(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(3) He said localness remained key to small stations' success, but added that regulation should move away from "outdated" and "pedantic" box-ticking to focus on output rather than input.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.
Truant
Definition:
(n.) One who stays away from business or any duty; especially, one who stays out of school without leave; an idler; a loiterer; a shirk.
(a.) Wandering from business or duty; loitering; idle, and shirking duty; as, a truant boy.
(v. i.) To idle away time; to loiter, or wander; to play the truant.
(v. t.) To idle away; to waste.
Example Sentences:
(1) Up to 20% of the senior school pupils may truant in a 2-week period and teachers report these youngsters to be more aggressive and to show more neurotic symptoms then the regular school attenders.
(2) Having more money to spend, working at a part-time job, spending more evenings out with a mixed-sex peer group, at a youth club, or out dancing, and playing truant from school were all associated with an increased risk of smoking.
(3) Despite the sample's relatively accurate knowledge about drugs and HIV infection, truants scored less well on these and other HIV-related issues.
(4) Actually, that’s just what he does, writing (apparently in retrospect from California) about three days in December 1949 when, having been chastised by his school “for not applying myself”, he plays truant over a long and memorable weekend in Manhattan.
(5) The truants, compared with their non-truanting peers, had three times the level of solvent misuse (14% compared with 4%), thrice the soft drug misuse (19% compared with 6%), and four times the involvement with hard drugs (9% compared with 2%).
(6) Young women were more likely than young men to be showing signs of distress, with a report earlier this week claiming that one in five teenage girls are opting out of classroom discussions and even playing truant because they hate the way they look.
(7) After she accused a neighbour of attempting to rape her, the 10-year-old Holiday, an incorrigible truant, was sent to a Catholic reform school until her mother secured her release.
(8) At 16, he starred as a boy playing truant in the short black-and-white film Boy and Bicycle (1965), directed by Ridley, who was studying at the Royal College of Art.
(9) It comes to something when a documentary series featuring yobs, truants, swearing at teachers, swearing by teachers, cyber-bullying and teenage pregnancy makes you believe in the education system again.
(10) The sections, imprints, and smears were examined by fluorescent microscopy with the use of Truant's modification of the auramine-rhodamine stain.
(11) Cluster analysis of information collected in a standard way indicated that there was a group of children with the features of 'school refusal' who often had generalized neurotic disorders as well and who were mostly girls, another group with the features of 'truancy' all of whom had conduct disorders who were mainly boys, and a third cluster of children who were usually 'truants' but less often psychiatrically disturbed.
(12) I have had to deal with runaway teens, stealing, drug and alcohol misuse, suicide, child-on-parent violence and truanting from school.
(13) Comparisons were made between alcoholics and nonalcoholics in a sample of Danish adoptees (mean age 30) and it was found that the alcoholics, as children, were more often hyperactive, truant, antisocial, shy, aggressive, disobedient, and friendless.
(14) Two modal types of truants were delineated: "authority defying" and "peer phobic."
(15) Truants differed little from non-truants regarding their drinking habits, but were more prone to being heavy smokers.
(16) Taliban officials even patrolled schools with attendance sheets and hauled truanting boys from their homes.
(17) She was always encouraging them to be lawyers despite their constant truanting.
(18) "That's why I have asked our social policy review to look into whether we should cut the benefits of those parents whose children constantly play truant.
(19) Paul Kelly, the headmaster of Monkseaton High School near Newcastle, has adopted a later start to the school day and this is having a marked impact, with reduced truanting and improved exam success .
(20) More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s.