What is "pedantic"

Usage examples of "pedantic".

Reuter said, in accented Anglic with the slightly pedantic twist of a CD veteran.

Gradus is discursively seduced in a way that makes the seeming distinction between him and Kinbote, as well as that between the baroque and the simple, the cultured and the barbarous, the homosexual and the heterosexual, and the roughly masculine and the decadently effeminized, appear to be nothing more than the product of an obsessive and pedantic imagination which insists on impressing its own absurdly reductive schema on a disorderly world that consistently eludes it.

Olivier Vinet, slender in figure, with a pallid face, lighted by a pair of malicious green eyes, was one of those sarcastic young gentlemen, inclined to dissipation, who nevertheless know how to assume the pompous, haughty, and pedantic air with which magistrates arm themselves when they once reach the bench.

Happily, the idea of the national State which the European, consciously or not, brought into the world, is not the pedantic idea of the philologues which has been preached to him.

The pedantic sciolist, prating of his clear explanations of the mysteries of life, is as far from feeling the truth of the case as an ape, seated on the starry summit of the dome of night, chattering with glee over the awful prospect of infinitude.

He was a clever chap, Burman, but there was nothing of the pedantic professor about him.

The food for its satire, too, is most admirably chosen, for no feature of the social life of that place and period is more amiably absurd than the efforts of the handicraftsmen and tradespeople, with their prosaic surroundings, to keep alive by dint of pedantic formularies the spirit of minstrelsy, which had a natural stimulus in the chivalric life of the troubadours and minnesingers of whom the mastersingers thought themselves the direct and legitimate successors.

By an able but carping critic it was alleged that the mere chemical analysis of old-fashioned Herbal Simples makes their medicinal actions no less empirical than before: and that a pedantic knowledge of their constituent parts, invested with fine technical names, gives them no more scientific a position than that which our fathers understood.

It is not too much to say, as it appears to me, that the Boers have in some ways revolutionised our ideas in regard to the use of artillery, by bringing a fresh and healthy common-sense to bear upon a subject which had been unduly fettered by pedantic rules.

After Gregor Samsa's incarnation, Kafka showed a fondness for naked heroes -- animals who have complicated and even pedantic confessions to make but who also are distinguished by some keenly observed bestial traits -- the ape of "A Report to an Academy" befouls himself and his fur jumps with fleas.

Though, if we are to be a trifle pedantic, my rapier can hardly be described as falcate since its blade is quite straight and true and shows not a curve.

Jackson's flank march was a fine achievement, and Lee's strategy thoroughly confused a pedantic Northern com-mand.

Many technical men, very able in their special departments, but dominated by a pedantic spirit and nearsighted, have asserted that excepting the induction motor, I have given the world little of practical use.

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.

Then they dump the boring, pedantic GSV that happened to be on the Incident Coordinating Rota, agree to wait-and-see with the Excession itself while sending investigatory reinforcements, start a localised mobilisation - mobilisation!