A resident is someone who lives in a particular place. For example, you are a resident of Southern Germany. A pendant is someone who is always on the lookout for errors made by others in writing or speech and then pointing out what they should have written or said. So a resident pedant would be a PF member with the job of checking people's posts for errors and then either correcting them or saying how they should be corrected. Now I'm not sure that's what Richard really meant. What he probably intended was someone having the job of making clear what people had said in posts which were unclear because of, say, mistypes or spelling errors.
quite a good explanation, Gordon
to be honest - I don't know (meaning: I have some doubts about that) whether Richards question is/was meant to be (that) serious ...
maybe he just wanted to point out that a correct grammar and punctuation in every posting would lead to a better understanding of the nonsense we tend to write
(for non-english-speakers ... or mothertonguers alike
) ...
... or maybe he already spotted some sort of a "resident pedant" at PF and wanted to give a somehow disguised advice in that direction ...
