Absurdly learned; scholarly in an ostentatious way; making an inappropriate or tiresome display of knowledge by placing undue importance on trivial details, rules, or formalities.
→ After that definition, you’re probably thinking that your guide through Verbal Advantage sometimes is pedantic about language. All right, it’s true. As we pedantic types like to say, mea culpa (MAY-uh KUUL-puh), which is Latin for “my fault.” On the other hand, I am also erudite, which as you learned in Level 3 means scholarly, possessing extensive knowledge acquired chiefly from books. That’s not such a bad combination for someone whose job is to help you navigate the stormy sea of English words.
So, my verbally advantaged friend, if you want to emulate my grandiloquent erudition, then please pardon my pedantry as I explain that the adjective pedantic, and the corresponding nouns pedant (PED-’nt) and pedantry (PED-’n-tree), come through Italian and Latin from the Greek paidagogos, a tutor of children, the source also of the word pedagogue (PED-uh-GAHG), which may mean simply a teacher, or a teacher who is narrow-minded, dogmatic, and—you guessed it—pedantic.
If we further break down the Greek paidagogos, we see that it is composed of pais, paidos, a boy or child, and agein, to lead or conduct, and means literally a leader or conductor of youngsters. For the significance of that derivation, let’s turn to the erudite and only occasionally pedantic Century Dictionary (1914). “Among the ancient Greeks and Romans,” says the Century, “the pedagogue was originally a slave who attended the younger children of his master, and conducted them to school, to the theater, etc., combining in many cases instruction with guardianship.”
This servile tutor of classical antiquity eventually rose to become the modern pedagogue, a teacher or schoolmaster, but a stigma of pedantry—meaning a slavish or dogmatic attention to rules and minor details of learning—remained on the word. Perhaps that explains why, when certain members of the teaching profession went looking for a more dignified word for themselves than teacher, they eschewed pedagogue and settled on three terms: educator, which is a good alternative; educationist, which is a pompous one; and educationalist, which is preposterous. But unless you happen to be a pedagogue, that’s neither here nor there, and being the verbose pedant that I am, I digress.
A pedant was originally a pedagogue or teacher, but that sense soon fell into disuse and a pedant became, as the Century Dictionary puts it, “a person who overrates erudition, or lays an undue stress on exact knowledge of detail or of trifles, as compared with larger matters or with general principles.” The noun pedantry refers to the manners or actions of a pedant. According to the eighteenth-century Irish essayist and dramatist Sir Richard Steele, “Pedantry proceeds from much reading and little understanding.” Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, defined pedantry as “the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.” And the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (KOHL-rij, two syllables) wrote that “pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.”
The adjective pedantic means absurdly learned; scholarly in an ostentatious way; making an inappropriate or tiresome display of knowledge by placing undue importance on trivial details, rules, or formalities.
