What's the difference between officious and pedantic?

Officious


Definition:

  • (a.) Pertaining to, or being in accordance with, duty.
  • (a.) Disposed to serve; kind; obliging.
  • (a.) Importunately interposing services; intermeddling in affairs in which one has no concern; meddlesome.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In January 2011, the Nobel peace prize laureate was admitted to a Johannesburg hospital for what officials initially described as tests but what turned out to be an acute respiratory infection .
  • (2) A survey carried out two and three years after the launch of the official campaign also showed a reduction in the prevalence of rickets in children taking low dose supplements equivalent to about 2.5 micrograms (100 IU) vitamin D daily.
  • (3) An official inquiry into the Rotherham abuse scandal blamed failings by Rotherham council and South Yorkshire police.
  • (4) Faisal Abu Shahla, a senior official in Fatah, an organisation responsible for a good deal of repression of its own when it was in power, accuses Hamas of holding 700 political prisoners in Gaza as part of a broad campaign to suppress dissent.
  • (5) A dozen peers hold ministerial positions and Westminster officials are expecting them to keep the paperwork to run the country flowing and the ministerial seats warm while their elected colleagues fight for votes.
  • (6) Greek officials categorically denied the report with many describing it as a "joke".
  • (7) This is not an argument for the status quo: teaching must be given greater priority within HE, but the flipside has to be an understanding on the part of students, ministers, officials, the public and the media that academics (just like politicians) cannot make everyone happy all of the time.
  • (8) Meanwhile, Hunt has been accused of backtracking on a key recommendation in the official report into Mid Staffs.
  • (9) A Palestinian delegation was to hold truce talks on Sunday in Cairo with senior US and Egyptian officials, but Israel has said it sees no point in sending its negotiators to the meeting, citing what it says are Hamas breaches of previous agreed truces.
  • (10) Channel 4 News said on Friday that Manji and the programme’s producer, ITN, had made an official complaint to press regulator Ipso.
  • (11) It can feel as though an official opinion has been issued.
  • (12) In one of Pruitt’s first official acts, for example, he overruled the recommendation of his own agency’s scientists, based on years of meticulous research, to ban a pesticide shown to cause nerve damage, one that poses a clear risk to children, farmworkers and rural drinking water supplies.
  • (13) Sawers's views are echoed by both US and Israeli officials.
  • (14) An official from Cafcass, the children and family court advisory service, tried to persuade the child in several interviews, but eventually the official told the court that further persuasion was inappropriate and essentially abusive.
  • (15) When allegations of systemic doping and cover-ups first emerged in the runup to the 2013 Russian world athletics championships, an IOC spokesman insisted: “Anti-doping measures in Russia have improved significantly over the last five years with an effective, efficient and new laboratory and equipment in Moscow.” London Olympics were sabotaged by Russia’s doping, report says Read more We now know that the head of that lauded Moscow lab, Grigory Rodchenko, admitted to intentionally destroying 1,417 samples in December last year shortly before Wada officials visited.
  • (16) Governmental officials as well as medical scientists in Taiwan have worked hard in recent years to develop and to implement various measures, such as prenatal diagnosis and neonatal screening, to lower the incidence of hereditary diseases and mental retardation in the population.
  • (17) My father wrote to the official who had ruled I could not ride and asked for Championships to be established for girls.
  • (18) Analysis of official registers reveals the 38 companies in the first wave of the initiative – more than two-thirds of which are based overseas – have collectively had 698 face-to-face meetings with ministers under the current government, prompting accusations of an over-cosy relationship between corporations and ministers.
  • (19) But late last month, Amisom pushed them out of Afgoye, a strategic stronghold 30km from Mogadishu, where Amisom officials say the militants used to manufacture explosives used in attacks on the capital.
  • (20) Without a renewables target, Energy Department officials said, it would be possible for a large proportion of this shortfall to be met by gas-fired power generation.

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.