pedant

Hamlet, Act II, scene 2. Hamlet mocks the pedant Polonius by pretending to be a pedantic madman.

A pedant is a person who is overly concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes a show of his learning.^[1]

Etymology

The English language word "pedant" comes from the French pédant (used in 1566 in Darme & Hatzfeldster's Dictionnaire général de la langue française) or its older mid-15th century Italian source pedante, "teacher, schoolmaster". (Compare the Spanish pedante.) The origin of the Italian pedante is uncertain, but multiple dictionaries suggest that it was a contraction of the mediaeval Latin pædagogans, present participle of pædagogare, "to act as pedagogue, to teach" (Du Cange).^[2] The Latin word is derived from Greek παιδαγωγός, paidagōgós, παιδ- "child" + ἀγειν "to lead", which originally referred to a slave who escorted children to and from school but later meant "a source of instruction or guidance".^[3][4]

Usage

When it was first used by Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost (1588), it simply meant "teacher". Shortly afterwards it began to be used pejoratively. Thomas Nashe wrote in Have with you to Saffron-walden (1596), page 43: "O, tis a precious apothegmaticall [terse] Pedant, who will finde matter inough to dilate a whole daye of the first inuention [invention] of Fy, fa, fum".

The term in contemporary English is typically used with a negative connotation, indicating someone overly concerned with minutiae and whose tone is perceived as condescending. Therefore, being referred to as a pedant, or pedantic, is generally considered insulting. However some people take pride in being pedants, notably among them Oliver Kamm, a columnist for The Times who observed, "What used to be standard English is now often regarded as finicky. My pedantry is an insistence on reasonable accuracy."^[5]

Related disorders

Pedantry can also be an indication of certain developmental disorders. In particular those with high-functioning autism, often use pedantic speech.^[6]

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is also in part characterized by a form of pedantry that is overly concerned with following rules, procedures and practices.^[7] Sometimes the rules that OCPD sufferers obsessively follow are of their own devising, or are corruptions or re-interpretations of actual rules.

Quotations

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• "A Man who has been brought up among Books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is what we call a Pedant. But, methinks, we should enlarge the Title, and give it to every one that does not know how to think out of his Profession and particular way of Life."—Joseph Addison, Spectator 1711. [1]
• "Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgements of one another."—Desiderius Erasmus [2]
• "The pedant is he who finds it impossible to read criticism of himself without immediately reaching for his pen and replying to the effect that the accusation is a gross insult to his person. He is, in effect, a man unable to laugh at himself."—Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
• "Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and sot"—Thomas Macaulay, describing James Boswell
• "The term, then, is obviously a relative one: my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education and someone else’s ignorance."—H. W. Fowler, Modern English Usage
• "Pedantic, I?"—Alexei Sayle
• "If you're the kind of person who insists on this or that 'correct' use... abandon your pedantry as I did mine. Dive into the open flowing waters and leave the stagnant canals be... Above all, let there be pleasure!"—Stephen Fry

References

See also

Look up pedant in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Nerd
• Prescription in language
• Snob