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gradgrind

n. (context obsolete English) One who relies solely on scientific measurements and observable facts without taking human nature into consideration.

Wikipedia
Gradgrind

Mr Thomas Gradgrind is the notorious school board Superintendent in Dickens's novel Hard Times who is dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise. His name is now used generically to refer to someone who is hard and only concerned with cold facts and numbers.

Usage examples of "gradgrind".

Is the fastidious, the impartial, the non-moral novelist only the grandchild, and not the remote posterity, of Dickens, who would not leave Scrooge to his egoism, or Gradgrind to his facts, or Mercy Pecksniff to her absurdity, or Dombey to his pride?

That boy is a type of the big, merciless man, the Gradgrind of the latter century.

For the last sixty or seventy years, this great bully, science, a sort of Gradgrind and Bounderby rolled into one, has been bragging and blustering and pretending to know everything and telling its grandmother how to suck eggs, and coming the most tremendous howlers on every possible subject.

Gradgrind usually improved these occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes.

Gradgrind usually improved these occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly trained from an early age she would have demonstrated to herself on sound principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes.

The failure of this system is seen through Louisa and Tom Gradgrind, and the ambitious sneak Bitzer.

But if you see the novel as an allegory, you might agree that they are not meant to represent full-bodied characters, but the alternative to the strict, bloodless theories and practices championed by Bounderby and Gradgrind.

Gradgrind knocked, Louisa rumbled to Coketown, over the coalpits past and present, and was whirled into its smoky jaws.

Only Sissy, who discontinues her education because she is thought "unteachable," but who stays on in the Gradgrind household, understands Louisa's plight.

Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages, and patriarchs.

Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs.

From the first, Sissy is treated by Gradgrind and Bounderby as a bad influence on the Gradgrind children, one who has been poorly educated and corrupted by the vulgar show folk who raised her.

No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine-driver.

He intended every child in it to be a model - just as the young Gradgrinds were all models.

The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in various departments of science too.