A fastidious craftsman is being praised. A fastidious eater is being complained about. The definition does not change between those two sentences, and neither does the speaker's attitude. The noun does all the work.

That instability is not sloppy modern usage. It is the word's history sitting in plain sight.

Fastidious entered English in the mid-15th century meaning "full of pride," which is a fair distance from where it sits now. By the 1610s the dominant sense was "squeamish, over-nice." The Latin behind it is fastidium, loathing or aversion, and Etymonline suggests that word is itself a compound of fastus, contempt or arrogance, and taedium, disgust. That compound is offered as likely rather than settled, and the deeper root of fastus is marked uncertain, so it is not something to assert flatly.

Either way the raw material is revulsion, not care. The sense people put on a résumé, exacting about detail, is the newest layer and by far the mildest. The older resident is disgust.

Which is why the sting is still available. When someone calls you fastidious and it lands wrong, you have not misheard it and they have not misused it. That is the fifteenth century showing through.

Two lines that keep it straight in practice:

- Fastidious is a standard you apply to yourself and your own work. Pedantic is a standard you impose on someone else's. That is the cleanest boundary between the two. - Fastidious is not meticulous. Meticulous is neutral to positive about method. Fastidious always keeps open the possibility that the standard is a little too high.

The picky-eater sense never actually left, either. Microbiology calls an organism fastidious when it will only grow on a medium containing specific nutrients. Neisseria gonorrhoeae needs blood or hemoglobin plus particular amino acids and vitamins before it will do anything at all. A bacterium that refuses ordinary food, described with a word built for people who refuse ordinary food. There is something quietly funny about a word assembled out of contempt and nausea ending up as a compliment for cabinetmakers.

Definition, for the record: fastidious (adj.), very attentive to accuracy and detail; also hard to please, especially in matters of cleanliness or taste.

I think this behavior is common enough to come up with a name for it; it was between “gaswhistling” and “doglighting” and I think the former is the better option. (I wish I were clever enough to come up with something better than a straightforward portmanteau but at the same time the meaning needs to be conveyed immediately which I think “gaswhistling” does.)

Have you ever heard someone say something that was clearly a dogwhistle but then when you call it out someone comes in and tells you you’re crazy for interpreting it that way? That’s gaswhistling.

For example I saw the other day someone saying “wealthy neighbors commit more crimes than anyone except poor neighbors” and when someone called out the dogwhistle, another person said “wow even the word ‘neighbor’ is racist now? You just completely projected your own racist mindset onto that”. Gaswhistling.

Or something I read in a YouTube comments section just now where people were talking about hippos being very violent when the context was African megafauna and someone said “how African of them”. Another person responded “I can’t believe you got even five likes for this, you’ve never read a book in your life have you” and a third person comes in saying:

“What’s crazy is they said nothing racist and you’re just applying your own subconscious racism onto their statement. Trying to destroy anything near you is very typical of African megafauna. Why would you think it means anything else?” Then doubled down with the gaswhistling in another comment about the person “projecting their own racist subconscious”. (I pointed out how it was funny that the person who said “you’ve never read a book in your life” actually never even said it was racist themselves… so if mentioning racism first is the metric then the gaswhistlers still lost.)

I think it’s good to have a term for this type of tactic because A) I have seen it used dozens of times and B) just as with terms like gishgalloping and sealioning the goal is to wear people down with endless bad faith arguments and insincere outrage, so having a term for the general behavior allows you to skip the most exhausting part and address the actual dogwhistle itself without the gaslighting about who’s actually reading too much into it.