What's the difference between exacting and pedantic?

Exacting


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Exact
  • (a.) Oppressive or unreasonably severe in making demands or requiring the exact fulfillment of obligations; harsh; severe.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Meanwhile Bradley Beal has developed into a dangerous second option and complementary sidekick in exactly the same way that Dion Waiters hasn't for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
  • (2) Furthermore, the backing away from any specific yield targets is exactly the lack of clarity that the FX market will not like."
  • (3) If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done.” The sudden release follows weeks of visual clues left on the Radiohead frontman’s Twitter and Tumblr.
  • (4) She was clearly elected on a pledge not to cut school funding and that’s exactly what is happening,” Corbyn said.
  • (5) Hamilton said it was uncanny to find themselves in another desperate emergency situation almost exactly one year on.
  • (6) He missed the start of the season while rehabbing from last season's ankle injury, played exactly six games with the Los Angeles Lakers before getting hurt again and even if he's healthy he may still sit the game out .
  • (7) Johnson said the move would save businesses £350m from not having to meet the more exacting standards, which will now only have to be met by buses.
  • (8) These experiments represent the first occasion that the sequence specificity of a DNA damaging agent, which causes only double-strand breaks, has been determined to the exact base-pair in intact cells.
  • (9) The structural region contains serines, threonines, and cysteines at exactly the positions required to give mature nisin by a series of post-translational modifications involving dehydration of serines and threonines to dehydro forms, and cross-linking with cysteine residues.
  • (10) We propose that exact definitions must be given for the auxiliary enzymes in the recommendations of standard determinations for enzyme activities.
  • (11) Early diagnosis and exact resuscitation are the two most important aspects of a plan of treatment which anticipates the need for early surgery.
  • (12) But now, that's exactly what he tried to do … and it didn't work," he said.
  • (13) Concentrations of DLIS were detectable in significantly more (58.3%) of the 12 CHF patients (group A) who were not receiving digoxin than in the 22 normal volunteers tested (13.6%) (P less than 0.05 by both chi-square and Fisher's exact test).
  • (14) One of them got a gold medal in medicine, for being top of the year, but they dropped out for exactly these reasons.” These are not alarmist stories being spread by campaigners.
  • (15) But she has struggled – quite awkwardly – to articulate her evolution on same-sex marriage, and has left environmental activists wondering what her exact energy policy is.
  • (16) The surgeon must have an exact idea of this canal before undertaking operation for plastics of the hernial defect.
  • (17) The exact timing of the introduction of the glycopeptide antibiotics teicoplanin and vancomycin in the management of the febrile neutropenic patient continues to be controversial.
  • (18) While some might deride the deliberate mainstream branding and design, saying it panders to convention, this is exactly what Hannah feels her community needs.
  • (19) The predicted yeast enzyme contains at least four potential membrane-spanning regions and several shorter hydrophobic regions that align exactly with similar sequences in the rat liver protein.
  • (20) If, for the PWC 170 will be utilized, two steps with heart-rates of greater than 140 on the lower and 160 to 170 on the higher step, the PWC 170 seems to be exactly sufficient for estimating the maximal physical working capacity for routine testing of healthy young people.

Pedantic


Definition:

  • (a.) Alt. of Pedantical

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Let me be one of 1,057 well-read pedants to let you know that Giovani dos Santos, 'the Mexican Ronaldinho' (last week's O Fiverão ) actually plays for Villarreal and not Málaga.
  • (2) 7.53pm BST Pedant repellant Style guide: GEORGE: What is Holland?
  • (3) He said localness remained key to small stations' success, but added that regulation should move away from "outdated" and "pedantic" box-ticking to focus on output rather than input.
  • (4) The enigmatic patience of the sentences, the pedantic syntax, the peculiar antiquity of the diction, the strange recessed distance of the writing, in which everything seems milky and sub-aqueous, just beyond reach – all of this gives Sebald his particular flavour, so that sometimes it seems that we are reading not a particular writer but an emanation of literature.
  • (5) For pedants and non-pedants it’s the ultimate horror.
  • (6) "He found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a 'sick Nazi orgy' as the News of the World claimed, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform," Dacre added.
  • (7) Although some find the distinction pedantic, it is useful to reserve the term hypoglycaemia for this biochemical state, and neuroglycopenia for the clinical syndrome that results.
  • (8) They thought he was cool, smart without being pedantic, and seemed to have his act together.
  • (9) The Finns were pretty cool; the Swedes, pedantic but resigned; the Danes did get a little fighty; the Icelanders were irritated not to have been given more attention; but the Norwegians, boy, they were not happy.
  • (10) Photograph: Alamy If you aren’t put off by a high density of boutique moustaches and pedantic coffee connoisseurs, Stoneybatter is a worthwhile deviation from Temple Bar, Grafton Street and the other well-trodden tourist zones.
  • (11) 6.40pm BST An early email from Zachary Gomperts-Mitchelson "Now, I know you said arguably, and trying, admittedly not that hard, to avoid sounding like an insufferable pedant, but surly the biggest game in Dortmund's history has got to be the Champions League final against Juventus that they won in 1996?"
  • (12) 9 None sense A sure sign of a pedant is that, under the impression that none is an abbreviation of not one, they will insist on saying things like "none of them has turned up".
  • (13) "Let me completely fail to avoid sounding like an insufferable pedant by saying that Zachary Gomperts-Mitchelson succintly said what we were all thinking, except that Dortmund won the Champions' League in 1997, not 1996," he writes.
  • (14) Furthermore, the ministerial code is pedantically explicit about the minister's total accountability for all the special adviser's actions.
  • (15) 28 mins: Look at the pedantic dolts I have to deal with: "So which bit of '4 mins ... 7mins ... 10 mins' is 'minute-by-minute' commentary, exactly?"
  • (16) There are visitors, presents, pedantic calls to NHS Direct – fatherhood's getting started!
  • (17) The magistrate, who paid “pedantic” and “meticulous” attention to detail, had definitely ordered weekend-only access, Treverton said.
  • (18) What made their embarrassment so irresistible to the more pedantic of their fellow engineers, who rushed in to make judgments about what had happened, was that they seemed to have brought it on themselves.
  • (19) The particle "up" is an intransitive preposition and does not require an object, so even the most pedantic of pedants would have no objection to a phrase like "This is pedantry with which I will not put up."
  • (20) When I’ve said this before on Twitter, people get into a pedantic spin about whether or not Jews are a race or a religion, but that’s irrelevant: they are considered a race by racists.