(n.) One who puts on an air of learning; one who makes a vain display of learning; a pretender to superior knowledge.
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(3) He said localness remained key to small stations' success, but added that regulation should move away from "outdated" and "pedantic" box-ticking to focus on output rather than input.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.
Pedantry
Definition:
(n.) The act, character, or manners of a pedant; vain ostentation of learning.
Example Sentences:
(1) The author also puts on record his objection to the pedantry that surrounds the use of the analysis by intentions-to-treat method.
(2) Not only is The Ladykillers one of Britain's best-loved films, but the cast of the 1955 production – Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers , Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom and Danny Green – did include one or two actors that modern film programmes like to wrongly refer to as "legends", even if (pedantry aside) you know what they mean.
(3) The authors present examples of words from contemporary languages, which are universally accepted and in which the semantic purity of the native language could lead to pedantry and vagueness.
(4) I’ll be back soon with more build up and team news, but for now get your thoughts, predictions and pedantry coming in to @KidWeil or graham.parker.freelance@guardiannews.com and to further whet your appetite, here’s what happened when these sides last met, during the semi-final round of World Cup qualifiers last September - have we mentioned the Grind™ of Concacaf qualification yet?
(5) Meanwhile here's Wayne Charlton, coming late to the party with a little more Holland-related style pedantry: "References to Dutch here in the USA are not necessarily to those originally from the Netherlands but usually the Germans - Dutch being a bastardization of Deutsch ('German' in German).
(6) Yet the self-conscious pedantry – "during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window"; "an island with a circumference of some two miles" – makes the author a little distant, and we begin to wonder if the essay is a true account or a literary concoction spun in the study.
(7) As a rare psychiatric variant, a syndrome characterized by compulsive pedantry combined with tic-like hyperkinesias was observed.
(8) 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."
(9) But eventually, I think, I landed on the right amount of outrage and pedantry that made the routine work.
(10) Our results confirmed some of the generally described personality-characteristics in patients with phobia: the phobic symptoms are often accompanied by physical symptoms (sensation of dizziness, weakness sensation, palpitation, sleep disturbance, heavy sweating and breathlessness) and psychic symptoms (anxiousness, depression, restlessness, reduced self-awareness, pedantry, inhibition of aggressive impulses) which could be influenced by psychotherapy.
(11) "While not trying to engage in the normal pedantry, can I note that Tab Ramos's much-lauded loyalty [last week's O Fiverão letters] is more a factor of MLS who hold his contract than Tab.
(12) None of his novels look particularly kindly upon his fellow man, but Lucky Jim , his first, is driven by a particularly epic disdain for the idiocies, pedantries, mindless rules and unpleasant personal habits with which humanity is cursed.
(13) preposition at the end of a sentence Winston Churchill did not, as legend has it, reply to an editor who had corrected his prose with "This is pedantry up with which I will not put."
(14) It is quick without being rash, accurate without leaden pedantry, thoughtful without being ponderous, and unpredictable in its opinions without being tediously contrarian.