(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(3) He said localness remained key to small stations' success, but added that regulation should move away from "outdated" and "pedantic" box-ticking to focus on output rather than input.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.
Schoolmaster
Definition:
(n.) The man who presides over and teaches a school; a male teacher of a school.
(n.) One who, or that which, disciplines and directs.
Example Sentences:
(1) In Herbert Ross's Goodbye Mr Chips (1969), based on the Terence Rattigan stage play, he won hearts as well as minds with a tender performance as the shy schoolmaster who falls in love with Petula Clark, and in 1972 he gave an extraordinary turn in a cult movie rarely revived now, Peter Medak's The Ruling Class, in which he played a young man who succeeds to an earldom after the ageing incumbent dies in an auto-erotic strangling incident, and reveals that he believes himself to be Jesus Christ.
(2) Chris Keates, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said: “Had the review body not been constrained by the arbitrary pay cap imposed by the government, there is no doubt that it would have been recommending a pay uplift higher than 1% for teachers.” Kevin Courtney, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said it was “shameful” that Morgan had failed to address the STRB’s concerns over staff shortages.
(3) Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said: "It's what lies behind the figures, rather than the figures themselves, which should be the focus of attention.
(4) In another age, he might have become a schoolmaster or a colonial civil servant.
(5) Or Johnson, E – said, with accompanying admonitory finger-wagging and in a schoolmasterly tone by tweeters, emailers, etc up until that last, goal-scoring moment.
(6) For 10 years, Rolfe was a provincial schoolmaster and would-be Roman Catholic priest.
(7) He contributed to two more Granada anthologies, Nightingale's Boys (1975) exploring an old schoolmaster's reunion with a succession of former pupils, and Red Letter Day (1976), the challenge of which title provoked an incestuous comic masterpiece from Rosenthal, Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, in the same year.
(8) Graham Chapman recalled Davies as "not a very human person … if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster".
(9) His schoolmaster's voice, formal and clipped, softens at last into something approaching bemusement.
(10) To lecture China like a schoolmaster and with a sense of superiority is not acceptable.
(11) With his father standing on the steps in his corner, clapping impatiently like a schoolmaster, Eubank swished air way too often in the first five rounds.
(12) Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, couches her remarks in broad political terms – she's due to have her first official meeting with Wilshaw later this week.
(13) "I'm one of those people who was told by schoolmasters that he liked the sound of his own voice," he has said.
(14) A schoolmasterly, sometimes even hectoring, campaigner known as Sascha in reference to his Russian roots, he led the Greens from 1997 to 2008, turning the party into the country’s fourth biggest political force and stepping down only after elections in which it lost votes for the first time in a decade.
(15) After Makerere University, in Kampala, he taught for three years, admitting, later in life, that he was a schoolmaster by choice and a politician by accident.
(16) If it fails to do so, the NUT will proceed with its ballot and – based on the combative mood in Harrogate – go ahead even without support from its fellow teaching trade union, the more moderate NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers).