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pedantic
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  • After forty years' experience, he had learnt to manage his life and make the best of it on advanced European lines, had developed his personality, explored his limitations, controlled his passions—and he had done it all without becoming either pedantic or worldly.   (source)
    pedantic = excessive concern with formal rules, or book learning; or inappropriate showing off of knowledge
  • LIZA [speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great beauty of tone] How do you do, Mrs. Higgins?   (source)
    pedantic = excessive concern with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Jonathan was holding me by the arm, the way he used to in the old days before I went to school.  I felt it very improper, for you can't go on for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit.   (source)
    pedantry = excessive concern with formal rules
  • She was probably not a dressmaker after all, because she spoke correctly, almost pedantically.   (source)
    pedantically = with too much concern for formal rules or book learning
  • This, along with his phraseology, now and then was suggestive of the grounds whereon rested that imputation of a certain pedantry socially alleged against him by certain naval men of wholly practical cast,   (source)
    pedantry = being too concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too aggressive, thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely a pedant, and his shirts are atrocious.   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • But I have been pedantically exact, as you call it.   (source)
    pedantically = with too much concern for details or book learning
  • You might have said at least a hundred things
    By varying the tone. . .like this, suppose,. . .
    Aggressive:  'Sir, if I had such a nose I'd amputate it!'  ...
    Pedantic:  'That beast Aristophanes
    ...
    Dramatic:  'When it bleeds, what a Red Sea!'   (source)
    pedantic = too concerned with book learning
  • "He's a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb," said Will, with gnashing impetuosity.   (source)
    pedantic = with excessive concern for formal rules, details, or book learning
  • He was continually traveling through the three provinces entrusted to him, was pedantic in the fulfillment of his duties, severe to cruelty with his subordinates, and went into everything down to the minutest details himself.   (source)
    pedantic = excessive concern with formal rules and details
  • His gentleness was never tinged by dogmatism, and his instructions were given with an air of frankness and good nature that banished every idea of pedantry.   (source)
    pedantry = too much concern for formal rules and book learning
  • Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.   (source)
    pedantic = excessive concern with book learning
  • Despite his pedantry and his condescending tone, I felt grateful to him: it didn't occur to me that he was taking inventory.†   (source)
  • Holmesy, someday you're going to win the Nobel Prize for Being Incredibly Pedantic, and I'm going to be so proud of you.†   (source)
  • "Exactly!" said Xenophilius, his forefinger raised pedantically.†   (source)
  • Victor was saying, pedantically.†   (source)
  • She was more explicit: the young doctor she had heard so much about in connection with the cholera epidemic seemed a pedant incapable of loving anyone but himself.†   (source)
  • Pedants knew it to be an Albertasaurus but to everyone else it looked pretty much like a regular T. rex.†   (source)
  • There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.†   (source)
  • He had a dark, clear voice that stressed, pedantically, each word.†   (source)
  • Not satisfied that the old charges of monarchist and warmonger were sufficient, Callender called Adams a "repulsive pedant," a "gross hypocrite," and "in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent."†   (source)
  • When first I introduced him to Wyoh and Prof he sounded like a pedantic child; in short weeks he flowered until I visualized a man about own age.†   (source)
  • Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry .... I'm pretty sure irony isn't a deadly sin.†   (source)
  • It was only when they landed at National Airport that the pedant admitted the truth.†   (source)
  • "Your mother is in a catatonic state," the woman said in a cold, pedantic tone designed to strike absolute terror in all who were insecure and vulnerable, and she had an easy target in Oz.†   (source)
  • "Propofol is a short-duration anesthetic," lectured the woman pedantically.†   (source)
  • Startled, I realized that Nathan's gifted voice was in perfect mockery of my own—pedantic, pompous, insufferable.†   (source)
  • She was as angry as the river, repelled by his pettiness and pedantry, his flight from the furious truth of the place to the name of a paltry trickle.†   (source)
  • BERENGER: [to JEAN] You're just a pretentious show-off—[Raising his voice:] a pedant!†   (source)
  • He turned to Reich and nodded pedantically.†   (source)
  • And I wasn't being pedantic or quibbling.   (source)
    pedantic = excessively concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Anyone who's so petty and pedantic at the age of fifty-four was born that way and is never going to change.   (source)
    pedantic = with excessive concern for formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Stripping pods is a precise and meticulous job that might be suited to pedantic dentists or finicky spice experts, but it's a horror for an impatient teenager like me.   (source)
    pedantic = with excessive concern for details
  • We knew there's no keeping a born scholar ignorant, and at heart, I think, we didn't really want to, but we were nervous, even frightened, at the statistics on child pedants and academic weisenheimers who grow up into faculty-recreation-room savants.   (source)
    pedants = people too concerned with book learning
  • Then this idiot named Kyle lost it because he thought 'pedantic' meant the same thing as 'pedophile,' and I sort of melted down a little.   (source)
    pedantic = excessive concern for formal rules, details, or book learning
  • After that he talked solemnly, pedantically, of the Sunlight Man's uncanny powers, and the more he talked the surer he was that all he was saying (and all they said, too) was nonsense.   (source)
    pedantically = with too much concern for details
  • Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades?')   (source)
    pedantic = with excessive concern for formal rules and details
  • Formality is the same thing as pedantry!   (source)
    pedantry = too much concern for formal rules
  • "That's all pedantry and innovation, no use listening to it," the monks decided.   (source)
    pedantry = too much concern for formal rules, details, or book learning
  • This young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Indeed he was more pedantic than I can represent him, and placed more scraps of Latin in his speech; but...   (source)
    pedantic = with excessive concern for formal rules, details, or book learning
  • I never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies.   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Oh, I know he's a good fellow—you needn't frown—an excellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of him; but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant.   (source)
  • Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state—indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond.   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with formal rules or book learning
  • I am, as you see, a little impatient in matters intellectual and would prefer to be denounced as a pedant rather than to leave uncontested views I consider to be as deserving of refutation as those that you have formulated here.   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with details or book learning
  • But the idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)—this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse…   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Dessalles, the tutor he had brought from Switzerland, was wearing a coat of Russian cut and talking broken Russian to the servants, but was still the same narrowly intelligent, conscientious, and pedantic preceptor.   (source)
    pedantic = with excessive concern for formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Perhaps it need not be done so pedantically, thought Nicholas, or even done at all, but this untiring, continual spiritual effort of which the sole aim was the children's moral welfare delighted him.   (source)
    pedantically = with too much concern for formal rules and details
  • Ten years later, with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: "A pedant, and insufferable to the sight!"   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Here is none of your heavy-sides, a student who studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and sapience, one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession.   (source)
  • It was like some tedious pedant you got trapped beside on the school van, in Jimmy's view.†   (source)
  • I used to tease him about being pedantic.†   (source)
  • Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry, lust, and spanking.†   (source)
  • The flight from Boston to Washington was maddening because of a fossilized professor of pedantry — David never did get the course — who had the seat next to his.†   (source)
  • Pedant.†   (source)
  • Some six weeks later, a long-distance call came through from Boston at eleven-thirty at night, with much dropping of small coins in an ordinary pay phone, and an unidentified voice—with no intention, presumably, of sounding pedantically waggish—informed Mr. and Mrs. Glass that their son Zooey, at twelve, had an English vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy's, if he could be urged to use it.†   (source)
  • BERENGER: [to JEAN, continuing] ...and what's more, a pedant who's not certain of his facts because in the first place it's the Asiatic rhinoceros with only one horn on its nose, and it's the African with two ... [The other characters leave the HOUSEWIFE and crowd round JEAN and BERENGER who argue at the top of their voices.]†   (source)
  • We mount the stamped-out steps of the city bus with humility, knowing our gall, and more or less pure of heart as three old Jews (a balding, middle-aged man and his two thin sons, pedants in plastic spectacles, each one bearing, timidly, his meaningless, cheap token).†   (source)
  • Pedant.†   (source)
  • Pedant.†   (source)
  • pedant.†   (source)
  • They were—are, perhaps, still— part of the glib jargon of pedants.†   (source)
  • It was just that kind of pedantry that made me hate him wildly.†   (source)
  • — Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principal questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching.†   (source)
  • He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion.†   (source)
  • But he merely said pedantically, "In the old days of Elizabeth the barbers had lutes and guitars in the shop so the gentlemen waiting could sing and play.†   (source)
  • At present the Enemy says "Mine" of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it: Our Father hopes in the end to say "Mine" of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest, Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE XXII MY DEAR WORMWOOD, So!†   (source)
  • Then, a year's study of the lean, clear precision of Caesar, the magnificent structure of the style—the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliché of pedantic translation: "Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being propitious for carrying on war, Caesar began to arrange his legions in battle array.†   (source)
  • He began to talk pedantically and priggishly to someone behind him — something about the infant class.†   (source)
  • And Euripides (whatever the disparagement of pedantry) he thought one of the greatest lyrical singers in all poetry.†   (source)
  • A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.†   (source)
  • "The facts are as follows," replied Tibby, who had at times a pedantic lucidity.†   (source)
  • He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic.†   (source)
  • "And natural," repeated Lebedeff with pedantic obstinacy.†   (source)
  • Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren't going to help.†   (source)
  • The young man was of a pedantic turn of mind and she felt at once he would not do for her purpose.†   (source)
  • supposing she wasn't beautiful—supposing she was forty and pedantic—heavens!†   (source)
  • Do you consider us Germans pedantic—us other Germans?†   (source)
  • What you mean to say is that he's pedantic.†   (source)
  • FAUST
    Demand'st thou, Pedant, too, a document?†   (source)
  • Not for scoundrels, but for pedantic poseurs, 'haunted by profound, unsolved doubts.'†   (source)
  • he's not corruptible, as when he's offered a gift he says, 'I'll only accept this so that you don't think there's anything you've failed to do,' as far as fulfilling his duty goes he can be neither ruffled nor begged, as it says about the man that, 'he tires the doorkeeper with his requests', even his external appearance suggests a pedantic character, the big hooked nose and the long, thin, black tartar-beard.†   (source)
  • You are a pedant, my dear fellow.†   (source)
  • Heron made a poor attempt to imitate for his friend Wallis the rector's pedantic bass and then, laughing at his failure, asked Stephen to do it.†   (source)
  • They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne'er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.†   (source)
  • Until last year I endeavoured, as you do now, to blind my eyes by your pedantry to the truths of life.†   (source)
  • At last, having finished the beer, Hayward left Weeks' room hot and dishevelled; with an angry gesture he said to Philip: "Of course the man's a pedant.†   (source)
  • But these last had so thoroughly inculcated into him their likes and dislikes, at least in everything that pertained to their ordinary social existence, including that annex to social existence which belongs, strictly speaking, to the domain of intelligence, namely, conversation, that Swann could not see anything in Brichot's pleasantries; to him they were merely pedantic, vulgar, and disgustingly coarse.†   (source)
  • He had learnt all he needed concerning his own constitution many years ago, thanks to the social order into which he had been born, and when he came to study medicine he was repelled by the pedantry and fuss with which Europe tabulates the facts of sex.†   (source)
  • He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on every subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his opinions took shape in a miniature satire called "In a Lecture-Room," which he persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.†   (source)
  • Having once heard it said, and never having forgotten that in general conversation emphasis and the use of formal expressions were out of date, whenever he heard a solemn word used seriously, as the word 'fortunate' had been used just now by Swann, he at once assumed that the speaker was being deliberately pedantic.†   (source)
  • "All the same she was a geological relation; there is always the respect due to your geology," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life.†   (source)
  • What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order—that's the point!†   (source)
  • That form of address, as cultivated in the West and in civilized society, seems terribly bourgeois and pedantic to me.†   (source)
  • Had his notion that they ought to write one another not been very bourgeois, very pedantic—particularly when all along he had felt it was unnecessary, even undesirable for them to speak to one another?†   (source)
  • That would just be dry pedantry!†   (source)
  • This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.†   (source)
  • He was a pedant, to the most extreme point, the greatest pedant I had met on earth, and with that had a vanity only befitting Alexander of Macedon.†   (source)
  • In order to escape the imputation of pedantry we shall render the substance, and, so far as it is possible, the form of the dialogue that succeeded, into the English tongue.†   (source)
  • "And, uncle, is there not more or less land around the ocean?" said Magnet quickly; for she dreaded a premature display of the old seaman's peculiar dogmatism, not to say pedantry.†   (source)
  • It was moreover a seat of ease, indeed of luxury, telling of arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed, and containing a variety of those faded hangings of damask and tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished oak, those angular specimens of pictorial art in frames as pedantically primitive, those perverse-looking relics of medieval brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite exhausted storehouse.†   (source)
  • At first, Mr. Babcock's tender conscience seemed to him a capital farce, and his traveling back to Milan only to get into a deeper muddle appeared, as the reward of his pedantry, exquisitely and ludicrously just.†   (source)
  • In this phase the playwright who attempts to revive genuine drama produces the disagreeable impression of the pedant who attempts to start a serious discussion at a fashionable at-home.†   (source)
  • COMPLEMENTAL VERSES The Pretensions of Poverty Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, To claim a station in the firmament Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand, Tearing those humane passions from the mind, Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense, And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.†   (source)
  • In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,[88] of Johnson,[89] of Gibbon,[90] looks cold and pedantic.†   (source)
  • It was said amongst them on all hands that it had been a great mistake of the various governments not to have resisted sooner; and the liberals and radicals (the name as perhaps you may know of the more democratically inclined part of the ruling classes) were much blamed for having led the world to this pass by their mis-timed pedantry and foolish sentimentality: and one Gladstone, or Gledstein (probably, judging by this name, of Scandinavian descent), a notable politician of the nineteenth century, was especially singled out for reprobation in this respect.†   (source)
  • I too should agree to many of your reforms, but ...' 'Then we suspected that talk, perpetual talk, and nothing but talk, about our social diseases, was not worth while, that it all led to nothing but superficiality and pedantry; we saw that our leading men, so-called advanced people and reformers, are no good; that we busy ourselves over foolery, talk rubbish about art, unconscious creativeness, parliamentarism, trial by jury, and the deuce knows what all; while, all the while, it's a question of getting bread to eat, while we're stifling under the grossest superstition†   (source)
  • "grave persons" and "reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry.†   (source)
  • He was a bright, free, generous spirit, he had all the illumination of wisdom and none of its pedantry, and yet he was distressfully dying.†   (source)
  • Bar, with his little insinuating jury droop, and fingering his persuasive double eye-glass, hoped he might be excused if he mentioned to one of the greatest converters of the root of all evil into the root of all good, who had for a long time reflected a shining lustre on the annals even of our commercial country—if he mentioned, disinterestedly, and as, what we lawyers called in our pedantic way, amicus curiae, a fact that had come by accident within his knowledge.†   (source)
  • The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes.†   (source)
  • By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.†   (source)
  • "I'm bound to admit the fact," Smerdyakov drawled with pedantic composure, "that I have a secret with Fyodor Pavlovitch in this business.†   (source)
  • One day, however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair, he said to her: "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"†   (source)
  • He desired that society should labor without relaxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons, and he feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two or three centuries called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our colleges into artificial oyster beds.†   (source)
  • There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself "good sense"; Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and the true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which, because it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and is often only pedantry.†   (source)
  • Curious pedantries moved him.†   (source)
  • ...no pedant sophisters to confound us with unintelligible mysteries:   (source)
  • Most villainously; like a pedant that keeps a school i' the church.   (source)
  • The pedant, the braggart,   (source)
    pedant = someone too concerned with book learning
  • stupid, proud pedants   (source)
    pedants = people too concerned with formal rules, details, or book learning
  • Even the pedantic Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, oozing Harvard from every pore, uses /but that/.†   (source)
  • And the use of /illy/ is confined to pedants.†   (source)
  • That it should be regarded as an anti-social act to examine and exhibit the constantly growing differences between English and American, as certain American pedants argue sharply—this doctrine is quite beyond my understanding.†   (source)
  • This /e/-sound was once accepted in standard English; when it got into spoken American it was perfectly sound; one still hears it from the most pedantic lips in /any/.†   (source)
  • [13] The aim of this pamphlet is to rid the teaching of English, including grammar, of its accumulated formalism and ineffectiveness—to make it genuine instruction instead of a pedantic and meaningless routine†   (source)
  • The art of prose has little to do with the stiff and pedantic English taught in grammar-schools and a great deal less to do with the loose and lively English spoken by the average American in his daily traffic.†   (source)
  • But in England, during the pedantic eighteenth century, this /i/-sound was displaced by the original /oi/-sound, not by historical research but by mere deduction from the spelling, and the new pronunciation soon extended to the polite speech of America.†   (source)
  • Lounsbury, less pedantic, viewed its phenomena more hospitably, and even defined it as "the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed," and Brander Matthews, following him, has described its function as that of providing "substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out by hard service."†   (source)
  • It is full of what Bret Harte called the "sabre-cuts of Saxon"; it meets Montaigne's ideal of "a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesar's Latin."†   (source)
  • But in the colonies the process went on unimpeded, save for the feeble protests of such stray pedants as Witherspoon and Boucher.†   (source)
  • Webster, in one of his earlier books, denounced the /k/ in /skeptic/ as "a mere pedantry," but later on he adopted it.†   (source)
  • "/awful/ weather" and "an /awful/ job" have entirely sound support, and no one save a pedant would hesitate to use them.†   (source)
  • But before the end the author begins to succumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find [Pg182] paragraph after paragraph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this: Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some Adjective or Noun.†   (source)
  • [12] Most of the current efforts at improvement, in fact, tend toward a mere revision and multiplication of classifications; the pedant is eternally convinced that pigeon-holing and relabelling are contributions to knowledge†   (source)
  • The colonial pedants denounced /to advocate/ as bitterly as they ever denounced /to compromit/ or /to happify/, and all the English authorities gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American language despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and has got into the Oxford Dictionary.†   (source)
  • [Re-enter PEDANT below; BAPTISTA, TRANIO, and SERVANTS.†   (source)
  • But I have cause to pry into this pedant: Methinks he looks as though he were in love.†   (source)
  • [Enter TRANIO, and the PEDANT dressed like VINCENTIO.†   (source)
  • [BIONDELLO, TRANIO, and PEDANT, run out.†   (source)
  • But in any businesse, whereof a man has not infallible Science to proceed by; to forsake his own natural judgement, and be guided by generall sentences read in Authors, and subject to many exceptions, is a signe of folly, and generally scorned by the name of Pedantry.†   (source)
  • To which he made answer, "Your first difficulty about the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with.†   (source)
  • SIR P: Why this it is, that spoils all our brave bloods, Trusting our hopeful gentry unto pedants, Fellows of outside, and mere bark.†   (source)
  • How fiery and forward our pedant is!†   (source)
  • From thee only can the manners of mankind be known; to which the recluse pedant, however great his parts or extensive his learning may be, hath ever been a stranger.†   (source)
  • He presents Hector of Troy; the swain, Pompey the Great; the parish curate, Alexander; Armado's page, Hercules; the pedant, Judas Maccabaeus: And if these four Worthies in their first show thrive, These four will change habits and present the other five.†   (source)
  • Books will give us a very imperfect idea of it; nor will the stage a much better: the fine gentleman formed upon reading the former will almost always turn out a pedant, and he who forms himself upon the latter, a coxcomb.†   (source)
  • So necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges, and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learnt only in the world.†   (source)
  • And I,— Forsooth, in love; I, that have been love's whip; A very beadle to a humorous sigh; A critic, nay, a night-watch constable; A domineering pedant o'er the boy, Than whom no mortal so magnificent!†   (source)
  • [To the PEDANT] Sir, this is the gentleman I told you of; I pray you stand good father to me now; Give me Bianca for my patrimony†   (source)
  • [Exeunt TRANIO, Pedant, and BAPTISTA.†   (source)
  • Master, a mercatante or a pedant, I know not what; but formal in apparel, In gait and countenance surely like a father.†   (source)
  • [Enter BAPTISTA, VINCENTIO, GREMIO, the PEDANT, LUCENTIO, BIANCA, PETRUCHIO, KATHERINA, HORTENSIO, and WIDOW†   (source)
  • But, wrangling pedant, this is The patroness of heavenly harmony: Then give me leave to have prerogative; And when in music we have spent an hour, Your lecture shall have leisure for as much.†   (source)
  • [Enter PEDANT above, at a window.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • [Enter a PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • PEDANT.†   (source)
  • His attacks upon certain familiar pedantries of the grammarians were penetrating and effective, and his two books, "The Standard of Usage in English" and "The Standard of Pronunciation in English," not to mention his excellent "History of the English Language" and his numerous magazine articles, showed a profound knowledge of the early development of the language, and an admirable spirit of free inquiry.†   (source)
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