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How To Use Pedant In A Sentence

  • this also means that the 9-volt is the only battery in the grocery stores that is actually a *battery*, i.e. a plurality of separate cells working together, rather than a single cell. you can make a lot of friends in the world by saying, "i don't like to be pedantic, but that AA really isn't a battery, you know; just a cell. Making Light: Making light under difficult conditions
  • Again, it seems pedantic to quibble about the differences between strikers and attacking midfielders. Times, Sunday Times
  • I had the same middle parted haircut for eight years, and I was quite pedantic about this being perfect.
  • Sometimes the corrections are amusing exercises in pedantry.
  • She points out that there is some irony in living in a "Lake House" without a lake and even though, as I pedantically remind her, the word lake is Anglo-Saxon for "running stream," which we do have, and not a standing body of water, which we don't, her logic does not escape me. Broken Music, A Memoir
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  • Mesell Malkontent of Faux News, the gripping cutting edge metaphorist megamedia propaganda outlet, a non-contributor of the pasty pedantry and PIG’s Pundits in General, spouts ‘demon duck du jour’, and claims, somehow, she knows, somehow, that Hezbollah is just a beauty pagent… Think Progress » Malkin: Outrage About Qana ‘Manufactured,’ ‘If It’s Not Qana, It’s Something Else…It’s Beauty Pageants’
  • Not only was I tired, but listening to the same pedantic metaphysical reasoning for the second time from my friend, normally a lively conversationist, bored me out of my skull. An East Wind Coming
  • This form of pedantry is a favorite of the far right, for some reason. The Volokh Conspiracy » More on the Republic vs. Democracy Debate
  • The genuineness of this winning little letter could never be doubted except by the most dryasdust of pedants. The Books of the New Testament
  • Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you … or else it is nothing, an empty journalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. A ringing endorsement ...
  • The hatred of the pedantic is the characteristic sentiment of the time. English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century
  • It took at least five minutes before the wearisome, pedantical fellow had finished his arrangements and preparations. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844
  • The Oxford English Dictionary, the Pedant's Bible, gives" franticness "as" The state or condition of being frantic ", so we don't have to see 'frenzy' as the noun and 'frantic' as the adjective, despite their common etymology, especially because we also have 'frenzical'. Bolton Wanderers v Manchester United - as it happened
  • I'm not saying that ethics committees that question research proposals are always being pedantic.
  • No wonder some find his music insufferably boring and pedantic.
  • The dogmatic resistance to entrenchment would raise its arid and pedantic head.
  • Not two sentences into their answer the terms pedantic and didactic were employed with professorial authority. Build Blog » A Vocabulary List for Architects Who Want to Get Things Built
  • However much he might mock the pedantic generic confusions of the ‘pastoral, tragical comical’ theatre of his predecessors, Shakespeare was their heir.
  • You should all be ‘pedantic old farts’ about unambiguity in words, because no-one else is going to stop them from becoming completely malleable (or, put another way - completely meaningless.)
  • Suddenly, the grammar pedants were springing out of the woodwork from every direction and, whether we liked it or not, we were all being given lessons in how we should use our English.
  • Well-meaning pedants may wonder why so gifted a verbal prestidigitator as Mr. Ives has resorted so often to imperfect rhymes, each one of which diminishes the hectic glitter of the play's verbal surface by a tiny but measurable increment. Flying Couplets and Canapés
  • Pedants can decide whether that counts as usage or misusage. Times, Sunday Times
  • these interpretations are called `schemas' or, more pedantically, `schemata'
  • Any fool can be pedantic and snipe at what they think are minor errors in grammar.
  • In a language so expressive as the English, I hate the pedantry of tagging or prefacing what I write with Latin scraps; and ever was a censurer of the motto-mongers among our weekly and daily scribblers. Clarissa Harlowe
  • But this is a rather pedantic approach. Times, Sunday Times
  • We've already had the delightful suggestion of 'precisian'; now we have 'doryphore' - 'a pedantic critic of minor errors; a nitpicker'. Times, Sunday Times
  • There was one pedantic point that really annoyed me about this book: Arcturus is spelt incorrectly throughout, missing the first 'r'. May Books 19) Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
  • The negotiations are now down to detail that might seem pedantic elsewhere. Times, Sunday Times
  • It is not likely that this selfish and unwarlike pedant -- a "nithing", as they probably called him -- had ever been aught but a most unwelcome necessity to the lion-hearted Ostrogoths, and for all but the families and friends of the three slain noblemen, the imprisonment and the permitted murder of his benefactress must have deepened dislike into horror. Theodoric the Goth Barbarian Champion of Civilisation
  • This can seem a lot of work, pedantic and fussy but is truly worth it if you can manage.
  • Yet such is the established way of things that it seems almost pedantic to be pointing this out. Times, Sunday Times
  • The rule which I have tried to follow has been this: when the word has been hopelessly Latinised, as 'Phoebus' has been, I have left it as it usually stands; but in other cases I have tried to keep the plain Greek spelling, except when it would have seemed pedantic, or when, as in the word 'Tiphus,' I should have given an altogether wrong notion of the sound of the word. Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children
  • That said, I'm a bit of a picnic pedant; I have to have little twists of salt and pepper to dust on to my crisp salad or a ripe tomato or two.
  • He actually describes Addison, on the whole, as a 'dull prosaist,' and the patron of pedantry! Note Book of an English Opium-Eater
  • Well-bred persons, abhorring the pedantry of the blues, are usually _anti - blues_, or _ultra-antis_. Tales and Novels — Volume 09
  • I have language skills, I'm pedantic to stupendous heights, computer literate and I can fire and strip a pistol.
  • His pedantic freakish oration and the inerudite suppositions of his talk made my jaw drop! WordPress.com News
  • In politics he was one of the best literary representatives of the fastidious or pedantocratic school of government. Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) Essay 7: W.R. Greg: A Sketch
  • X. plays skilfully and correctly, but his expression continues crude, cold, monotonous; he shows too pedantic a solicitude about mechanical execution and strict time; he never ventures on a _pp. _, uses too little shading in _piano_, and plays the _forte_ too heavily, and without regard to the instrument; his _crescendi_ and _diminuendi_ are inappropriate, often coarse and brought in at unsuitable places; and -- his _ritardandi_! they are tedious indeed! Piano and Song How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of Musical Performances
  • They were being unnecessarily pedantic by insisting that Berry himself, and not his wife, should have made the announcement.
  • He would become a vain listener to himself, instead of a speaker, a pedant in place of a serious man, a histrion instead of a sincere person. Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic
  • It is a well-attested fact, especially since the sacred precincts of established truth have been raided by every puerile pedant and sciolist who can handle a pen, that any absurdity whatever, so long as it is clad "in the lion's skin" and no matter how loudly it brays, has some fatal claim upon the rambling credulity of the multitude. The Doctor's Daughter
  • It will just get you a reputation as a pedant and a grouch. Times, Sunday Times
  • It is painful to follow the inter-agency malfunctions, resentments and pedantries that opened the door to disaster. Times, Sunday Times
  • But probably the whole prodigious mass of classic lore, and of scriptural quotation, even more unfamiliar to most of his hearers, which the pedantic president forced upon the digestion of the unfortunate notables, was required to prove to their satisfaction that Francis had in this affair played the part of the "gentilhomme" he boasted of being. The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2)
  • He is learned, but neither stuffy nor pedantic.
  • Although slightly tinged with pedantism and preciosity, its freshness, its grace, its inspiration and sincerity, give it a flavour almost of primitive art. The French Revolution A Short History
  • Ethan, the danger in being pedantic is that you have to set a good example. Speaking of schadenfreude: Meanwhile, in the German elections « BuzzMachine
  • Long-winded sentences and pedantic phraseology have yielded place to brief reports.
  • I caught that too. jukebox is a real stickler and pedant when it suits him; but truly elastic when it comes to his own dishonest misstatements. The Volokh Conspiracy » Our Own Randy Barnett Talks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit) About Whether ObamaCare Is Constitutional
  • Sorry to be pedantic but it really irked me for some reason.
  • But if the Georgian and the kind-souled Soloviev served as a palliating beginning against the sharp thorns of great worldly wisdom, in the curious education of the mind and soul of Liubka; and if Liubka forgave the pedantism of Lichonin for the sake of a first sincere and limitless love for him, and forgave just as willingly as she would have forgiven curses, beatings, or a heavy crime -- the lessons of Simanovsky, on the other hand, were a downright torture and a constant, prolonged burden for her. Yama: the pit
  • They tend to make your style heavy, dry, and pedantic.
  • Medicine can no longer reproach me with being unfaithful: I've paid a proper tribute to erudition, and to what old writers call pedantry.
  • Big can be beautiful, and surprisingly few of the buildings here display the empty pedantry conspicuous in contemporary paintings and sculpture.
  • Sorry, I was just being pedantic about the word pedantic, noticing **in general** how people use the term and their topsy-turvy sense of priorities seem to be. Phi Beta Kappa + masters degree = instant Etruscanist
  • Time could not be wasted on pedantic evidence sifting. Times, Sunday Times
  • There are a very few words - brock, for badger being one, combe, meaning a deep valley, and which appears in some English village names and in contemporary Welsh, another, torr, a mountain peak - which seem to have survived, at least among those who speak preciously or somewhat pedantically today. Excerpt: The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester
  • It will just get you a reputation as a pedant and a grouch. Times, Sunday Times
  • Generation gap, conservation, reminiscence, pedantry and stubbornness all basically derive from that.
  • Perhaps this is the wrong forum on which to be so pedantic, but this is something that has bothered me for a while.
  • They speak in an overprecise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs.
  • Call me a pedantic, stubborn, value for money freak, but don't call me unhearing.
  • For me pedantism (which I misspelled intentionally above - God, I make me laugh) is a mask hiding my base, blue collar roots. Cheeseburger Gothic » Snip snip.
  • His comfortable view was that “the sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of books [97].” Rousseau
  • More pedantry … my understanding is that the pet name for a recalcitrant recidivist is “scrote” (for “scrotum”) rather than “scroat”. Cross & Rude « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG
  • He apparently took keen pleasure in holding up to ridicule and in satirising, what he was pleased to call his ponderous pedantries, his solemn affectation of profundity and wisdom, his narrow-mindedness, and his intolerable and transparent egotism. A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3
  • So, if you're having a new year's eve dinner party, blinis pedants' note: like panini, "blini" is already plural but we'll stick with English convention here are the perfect way to kick things off. How to cook perfect blinis
  • I then went to bed, resolving my first business in the morning should be to discharge this troublesome, pedantic, self-conceited coxcomb, who seemed so much disposed to constitute himself rather a preceptor than a domestic. Rob Roy
  • His lecture was so pedantic and uninteresting.
  • Writing was his favourite pastime, pedantic, unpoetic stuff dealing with politics, history, education.
  • This architect had been a pedant.
  • A prig or a pedant was his favourite butt, and the performance was rendered all the more effective by his elaborate assumption of the _grand seigneur's_ manner. Collections and Recollections
  • Anyway, poofreading, sorry, proofreading is for pedants and you are a writer (as well as a worrier!). Coquilles
  • Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity; we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right to their places. The Foundations of Personality
  • He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to him, and he avoided them. A House of Gentlefolk
  • I still think meaning would warrant pluralisation in edited writing; “meanings of words” has a slightly pedantic feel, but it helps underline the point that words carry multiple mutable meanings. National Grammar Day 2010: Ten More Common Grammar Myths, Debunked « Motivated Grammar
  • Muriel Gray may be wrong-headed at times and her sentence structure may offend grammatical pedants but at least she is thought - provoking and often entertaining.
  • My dictionary defines a pedagogue as a pedantic or dogmatic teacher and there is a lot of that about Waters.
  • You ground your argument in linguistic logic, and the only refutation is pedantry. Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct « Motivated Grammar
  • And what of dignity or meaning could be said? where talking of sacred subjects is not allowed, under the pretext that it scatters those blessings which should be carefully treasured up; and bestowing much information concerning the secular plans of economy practiced by your own to the other sex is not approved; and where to talk of literary matters would be termed bombastic pedantry and small display, and would serve to exhibit accomplishments which might be enticingly dangerous. The Communistic Societies of the United States From Personal Visit and Observation
  • None of this has anything much to do with pronunciation, as everyone except pedants is likely, eventually, to make the word conform to their language, in colloquial usage at least. Languagehat.com: THE ERISTIC GENITIVE OF EURO.
  • Egregious typos in pedantic language post = auto-pwn. Matthew Yglesias » Health Care Plan Getting More Popular
  • Brandon Endy i didnt really want spiderman 4.....until i saw that simple poster and got a chill! taha may 6 is my 21th birthday :D pedant SPIDER-MAN 4 and IRON MAN 2 Movie Posters – Collider.com
  • Starting off in the seedy clubs and backdoor whiskey bars of Sunset Strip, writers will embrace their inner straight male lesbians and put on the fishnet stockings, friz their hair, and learn to type in falsetto to blazing riffs, tricky hooks, and pedantic sililoquies that would make Slash blush. LOST Waves Back at Fans of the Nerd Persuasion
  • But this is true, that of the methods of common-places that I have seen, there is none of any sufficient worth, all of them carrying merely the face of a school and not of a world; and referring to vulgar matters and pedantical divisions, without all life or respect to action. The Advancement of Learning
  • Among a giddy and light-minded people, they have appropriated to themselves the post of honour of pedantry: they confound the levity of jocularity, which is quite compatible with profundity in art, with the levity of shallowness, which (as a natural gift or natural defect,) is so frequent among their countrymen. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
  • _refuted; redargued_, the alternative word, was felt to be pedantic. The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg
  • Ha, true, but then we'd have to argue over, since it's not just normal pedantic but * super pedantic*, whether my argument-escape-hatch/weasel words 'pretty close' cover my ass. ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science
  • After all, if we all stayed pedantically committed to our initial interests and behavioural patterns life would seem an awful lot longer and drearier than it presently does. Dear Mariella: I do yoga, which makes my boyfriend reckon that I've joined a cult. Can we get past this?
  • There are moments in Bach when I would accuse him of nimiety, a pedantic thoroughness, more artifice than art.
  • They would become even more bureaucratic and even more pedantic.
  • There's simply no way around the system: it's pedantic, laboured and mind-numbingly frustrating.
  • This can seem a lot of work, pedantic and fussy but is truly worth it if you can manage.
  • So scrupulous, and so close to perfect: that's the impression the reader is intended to glean from such exercises in pedantry.
  • Deeply attached to old values, and seeing the rapidly changing world about him through the distorting lens of a pedantic and snobbish literary tradition, Libanius was vain, petty, and wrapped in finicking antiquarianism.
  • Fantastic piece of writing, with just one minor error which only a really sad Bruce pedant would point out - the 'multimillionaire' phase came not after 'Born To Run', but somewhere around the end of 'the River' tour in 1981 - they were still broke on the 'Darkness' tour in Expecting Rain
  • He covertly hired one of the era's poison pen writers, James Callendar to smear president John Adams as a "repulsive pedant" and "a hideous hermaphroditical character. Caryl Rivers: Goodbye to St. Barack
  • To affirm that Robespierre was a pedantic "swotter" is not to reveal the causes of his absolute power over the Convention, at a time when he had spent several months in decimating it with perfect impunity. The Psychology of Revolution
  • Publishing on-line without proofreading is probably not the greatest of sins, but for a grammar pedant such as I, it's pretty transgressive nonetheless.
  • The questioner is shouted down, accused of being a grammatical pedant.
  • The administrators must simplify the process and tell referees to be less pedantic. Times, Sunday Times
  • I have the thread of something in this pedantry, that may lead me out of this plague-pit. LOOKING FOR THE SPARK
  • I shall never upgrade, you misanthropic bile spewing pedantical tosser! It’s No Name-Calling Week, mofos! « raincoaster
  • The way I practice witchcraft has changed a lot, I'm a lot less pedantic now, I'm a lot more intuitive.
  • Wendy", as it is a contrived name first found in a popular fiction, and given its similarity to "windy", is hardly any better -- as it suggests a verbal facility with rhetoric designed, pace Burke's conception of Dramatism and the pedant, to elide the varied and opposed interests of the so-called abled community and those of persons with disabilities. Readercon 16: Day 1
  • When pedants like Bentley and Munro object that the phrase is unsuitable to its context, of what avail is it to be assured by persons of taste — that is to say per-sons of British taste, Victorian taste, sub-Tennysonian taste — that these are exquisite lines? On 'The Invention of Love': Another Exchange
  • In was in that quarter, quia multum amavit, — because he loved much — that he was regarded as vulnerable by “serious men,” “grave persons” and “reasonable people”; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. Les Miserables
  • But Sharp berated Neal over the perceived inaccuracies of their "hoydenish", boisterous dancing, while she in turn accused him of pedantry. Cecil Sharp and the Morris Men
  • It is entirely appropriate that I have been accused of being pedantic when reviewing certain cryptozoological works. Archive 2006-04-01
  • As a director, his perfectionism / pedantry would have tested the patience of any producer.
  • Being a pedantic word-lover, and yes, a feminist, this drives me berserk.
  • There was a hint of pedantry in his elegant style of speaking.
  • Every couple of months Matt baits us with this Alanis reference and invariably, it ends up in pedantry. ur_land says: Matthew Yglesias » Census Conspiracies Strike Back
  • Now, the ethically-minded man is not a pedantic micrologist who wastes his time on the minutiae of conduct. The Essentials of Spirituality
  • Fowler is not alone in rejecting octopi; some linguists do so on the grounds that octopus was not originally a Latin word but a Greek one – hence the pedantic plural octopodes, which is rarely if ever seen outside dictionaries, usage guides, and blog posts such as the one you are reading. Octopuses, octopi and oktopodes
  • There was a hint of pedantry in his elegant style of speaking.
  • Pedantically speaking, there is no similar conversion for objects.
  • Generation gap, conservation, reminiscence, pedantry and stubbornness all basically derive from that.
  • I was under the impression that this was a forum where political issues could be discussed rationally: if you want me to be pedantic and point out every logical fallacy in every reply I've received then I'll do that.
  • For example, there are about fifty pages in the middle somewhere that are entirely concerned with the lovers' financial imbroglios, related with all the vim of a pedantic tax accountant working his way along a paper trail.
  • [2056] Because they are rich, and have other means to live, they think it concerns them not to know, or to trouble themselves with it; a fitter task for younger brothers, or poor men's sons, to be pen and inkhorn men, pedantical slaves, and no whit beseeming the calling of a gentleman, as Frenchmen and Anatomy of Melancholy
  • Donoghue's a true historian, whose period detail is exacting enough to please the most pedantic of pedants, while her style displays an intimacy with the past that's both unpretentious and modern.
  • You can be too pedantic about grammar and pronunciation and you can probably tell from this that spelling is a problem for me, especially when typing.
  • What you call the pedantry and priggishness and all the rest of it is exactly what poor Breckenridge asked almost on his knees, wonderful man, to be _allowed_ to pay you for; since even if the meddlers and chatterers haven't settled anything for those who know -- though which of the elect themselves after all _does_ seem to know? The Outcry
  • As a plaudit, "recently established definitive Russian text" may sound like a pedantic mouthful, but Platonov is anything but a writer of merely academic interest. A Different Stripe:
  • L lost sight of what they were debating about and focussed instead on being pedantic (contrary to your opinion, Lucretia, that is not a very professional debating tactic). Sex and the single Marvel super heroine | Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources – Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment
  • The pedant might note that the Internet, axiomatically, is all social media, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that social media includes any digital environment built on the contributions of and interactions among people — or in the case of dogster. com, their dogs. The Web 2.0 Bubble
  • His book is hugely enjoyable as a ramble round class distinctions, pedantries and pretensions, and the different types of snobs. Times, Sunday Times
  • While it's probably true that the word "galoot" derived from a slur for African galley slaves, I would see it as ungracious and pedantic to bring this up with the implication that the person so informed must avoid the term for fear of transgressing the bounds of tolerance and responsibility. Friday Night Open Thread: Comics
  • They were being unnecessarily pedantic by insisting that Berry himself, and not his wife, should have made the announcement.
  • It must be confessed, however, that it is generally avoided in print, while the form that we have ventured to call pedantic is not uncommon. Case.
  • The book is a demonstration of scholarship without pedantry.
  • When one cultures a happy go lucky, easy come easy go, low to no stress persona - pedantism is like shin splints. Cheeseburger Gothic » Snip snip.
  • They were pedantic disciples who united with all the affectations of the Italian style a certain German coarseness, and the outcome was a bastard style inferior to the earlier schools -- childish, stiff, and crude in color, with no sense of light and shade. Holland, v. 1 (of 2)
  • A pedant will always insist that you ask for 'fewer' items rather than 'less'.
  • Athaeneus, to philosophers and travellers, an opiniative ass, a caviller, a kind of pedant; for his manners, as Theod. Anatomy of Melancholy
  • The State in all European countries, and in England first of all, as I hope, will discover that its functions are now, and have long been, very wide of what the State in old pedant Downing Streets has aimed at; that the State is, for the present, not a reality but in great part a dramatic speciosity, expending its strength in practices and objects fallen many of them quite obsolete; that it must come a little nearer the true aim again, or it cannot continue in this world. Latter-Day Pamphlets
  • Again, it seems pedantic to quibble about the differences between strikers and attacking midfielders. Times, Sunday Times
  • We thought he was a bit pedantic at times. The Sun
  • A vain man, a soldier and a scholar, pedantic, irritable, but in earnest; a complimenter of Emperors, a leader of the reform party, a partisan of Luther's, the friend and correspondent of Erasmus, the elective brother of Dürer. Albert Durer
  • In approaching such an artist, one could be forgiven for sniffing the air for a tinge of stuffy curatorial purism or poker-faced pedantry.
  • The first researcher to note and catalog the abnormal experiences associated with TLE was neurologist Norman Geschwind, who noted a constellation of symptoms, including hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, fainting spells, mutism and pedantism, often collectively ascribed to a condition known as Geschwind syndrome. Eight Diseases that Give You Super Human Powers | Impact Lab
  • In this queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in hand, there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means with another profounder knowledge. Under Western Eyes
  • My dictionary defines a pedagogue as a pedantic or dogmatic teacher and there is a lot of that about Waters.
  • A Ph.D. is quite unnecessary in order to be academic in this sense, just as one does not have to be a scholar in order to be pedantical. Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism
  • In order not to sound too didactic or pedantic, the lecturer added anecdotes and personal comments.
  • These will include essays on contemporary fiction that are indeed a tad too scholarly (some might say "pedantic") or just too long for ordinary blog posts, as well as other surveys or discussionsofcritical books and articles onpost-1980 fiction. Out of the Ashes
  • Weds Letters), I would suggest the expression for responding to a post, when even as you're writing, you suspect they just put it there to provoke the kind of fusty response you're now drafting, but you're just too pedantic to stop yourself commenting, should be known as post-imprissionism. BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition
  • Jefferson's PR man, a proto-Karl Rove, slammed Adams as a "repulsive pedant" and "hideous hermaphroditical character". Clancy Sigal: Wimps Don't Win
  • By this means, small poets have such a stock of able hard words lying by them, as dryades, hamadryades, aönides, fauni, nymphæ, sylvani, &c. that signify nothing at all; and such a world of pedantic terms of the same kind, as may serve to furnish all the new inventions and "thorough reformations" that can happen between this and English Satires
  • It starts off with a satirical learned encomium after the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian; it then takes a darker tone in a series of orations, as Folly praises self-deception and madness and moves to a satirical examination of pious but superstitious abuses of Catholic doctrine and corrupt practices in parts of the Roman Catholic Church — to which Erasmus was ever faithful — and the folly of pedants (including Erasmus himself). Capsule Summaries of the Great Books of the Western World
  • At this point, the auteur's films felt fairly strained and pedantic.
  • It was pedantic rather than reasonable, just to the point of being grotesque.
  • I am no pedant and avoid being dogmatic concerning English grammar and expression.
  • The redoutable Pedant General in Ordinary uses this little exchange as a test case of his treatise on Taking Offence. Plant photography, anyone?
  • The past few articles I have written for this site have been pedantic responses to articles written by others.
  • On the other hand, you must carefully shun the affectation of _bombastic diction_ -- it is lamentable to see a preelucidated theme rendered semidiaphonous, by the elimination of simple expression, to make room for the conglomeration of pondrous periods, and to exhibit the phonocamptic coxcombry of some pedant, who mistakes sentences for wagons, and words for the wheels of them. The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810
  • They were being unnecessarily pedantic by insisting that Berry himself, and not his wife, should have made the announcement.
  • I am no pedant and avoid being dogmatic concerning English grammar and expression.
  • It is not merely a pedantic question - although there is much to be said for scientists providing an honest portrayal of their figures.
  • Consider, too, how a holiday of action would disenthral the writer from the pettiness of cliques and coteries, with their pedantic atmosphere and false perspectives. Without Prejudice
  • P.S. The other (pedantic) point, which I forgot to make, is that you counterexample isn't really a counterexample to the theory - if only because the theory is almost tautologically true: what is a "high status group" other than a group which people have positive feelings towards and want to identify with? What, Me Rich?, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  • Cricket has a reputation for its confusing, pedantic rules.
  • Not the least among its recommendations is, perhaps, that it is scholarly without being pedantic that is to say, that it aims at correctness without sacrificing the right effect of the whole to over-insistence on small details. The Koran (Al-Qur'an)
  • a captious pedant
  • Some would argue that this is both pedantic and unrealistic, since money is fungible and one £10 note is for all purposes the same as another.
  • Again, it seems pedantic to quibble about the differences between strikers and attacking midfielders. Times, Sunday Times
  • Big can be beautiful, and surprisingly few of the buildings here display the empty pedantry conspicuous in contemporary paintings and sculpture.
  • In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.” Amen to intellectualism!
  • For years, pedantic scholars have crowed about the debt rock owes the blues.
  • But any woman who could use that word pedant, I reasoned, call her ex-husband “duplicitous” and a “narcissist,” and describe an assistant manager we both worked for as a “troglodyte” was a woman I felt I could spend time talking to and perhaps even want to live with, despite the three kids, a first husband, and her extra year in age. Closing Time
  • In these each aspirant's contribution was judged, in conformity with strict, somewhat pedantic rules, on his song's sacred content: its prosody, its rhyme, and its melody.
  • Except for a brief but pithy description of how to make secret du crapaud, a particularly vile poison made from a toad, that was taken almost entirely from primary sources, this was one of the dullest and most pedantic books I have ever read. An open letter to academia
  • For too long, we linguistic pedants have cringed, watching this phrase used, misused, and abused, again, and again, and again.
  • Miheng,Being famous for his abusive ability, pedantic intellectual as the tongue steel,who couldn't compare to Zhuge liang with such ability,momentum,well-grounded in abuse.
  • In the flesh she can be tart, a pedant even.
  • During the English Renaissance, language purists and nationalists resisted the influx of pedantic and recondite inkhorn terms adapted from Greek and Latin such as condisciple, splendidious, and adnichilate. VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol VII No 1
  • The good ones are fun and clever; the bad ones humourless and pedantic.
  • A pedant or two might ask if you really mean rocket propellants when you say rocket fuel.
  • It has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape, professionalism, departmentalism pedantry, officiousness, intolerance, lethargy, and the tyranny of custom; it has its dangers in that, resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the concrete, it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of ancient and dear illusions, and to degenerate into chaos and caprice. Personality in Literature
  • As a director, his perfectionism / pedantry would have tested the patience of any producer.
  • In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.” Archive 2008-11-01
  • Now began the native spleen of Oceana to be much purged, and men not to affect sullenness and pedantism. The Commonwealth of Oceana
  • Some may dismiss this episode as a pedantic storm in a teacup. Times, Sunday Times
  • 'tierce' with the intervals of music which bears those names: when he made a feint he cried out, "take care of this 'diesis'," because anciently they called the 'diesis' a feint: and when he had made the foil fly from my hand, he would add, with a sneer, that this was a pause: in a word, I never in my life saw a more insupportable pedant. The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau — Complete
  • Big can be beautiful, and surprisingly few of the buildings here display the empty pedantry conspicuous in contemporary paintings and sculpture.
  • Against the first objection, I hope to show in this chapter that the conceptual distinction is far from mere pedantry.
  • Dismayingly, pedants aren't much interested in this potential. Times, Sunday Times
  • Yet this monarch of all things detested pedantry, either as it shows itself in the mere form of Greek and Latin, or in ostentatious book-learning, or in the affectation of words of remote signification: these are the only points of view in which I have been taught to consider the meaning of the term pedantry, which is very indefinite, and always a relative one. Literary Character of Men of Genius Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions
  • There is much pedantry, but every so often there is stark beauty.
  • Pedant - first rule of pedantry is to make sure that your post is perfect and to understand that the spellchecker is, like us all, fallible. Cross & Rude « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG
  • In order not to sound too didactic or pedantic, the lecturer added anecdotes and personal comments.
  • How then, pedant! would you have them regarded as atheists, because they adore only one God! You condemn this other proposition: “The man of sense knows that men are what they must be; that all hatred against them is unjust; that a fool commits fooleries as a wild stock bears bitter fruits.” A Philosophical Dictionary
  • Pedants of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your trammels. Times, Sunday Times
  • A pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm in fishing for men. Letters to Dead Authors
  • That said, I'm a bit of a picnic pedant; I have to have little twists of salt and pepper to dust on to my crisp salad or a ripe tomato or two.
  • Welding punked-out, ska, psycho-rap backfilled with wailing metal dirges, Bad Acid Trip surge pedantically from whimsical to venomous in one foul breath.
  • `Well, it was only... The receptionist said Dr McIntosh would come -- "She heard her voice, pedantic, fussy. THE GOLDEN LION

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