Word: pedantic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...every time I shook the academic tree. It is an attitude I heartily commend to all incoming freshmen for, as a sage old British friend once told me, "The only place one is likely to find the Philosopher's Stone is in the gallbladder of a bilious pedant." What I sought during my stay at Harvard was not Veritas (how many of us would recognize that rare commodity even if we did come face to face with it?), but an opportunity to learn a little, teach a little, reflect a little and read, write and converse a lot. I couldn...
Much of the current concern about language is only a pedant's despair. Some of the preoccupation masks a cynical delight in the absurdities that people are capable of perpetrating with words No one worries very much about the schoolmarm's strictures against am t and "it's me." Connoisseurs savor genuine follies like those of the new priests of thanatology, who describe dying as terminal living," or the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare who explained a $61.7 million cut in social services as "advance downward adjustments." But whatever mirth there may be in these...
Unfortunately, that is not all the author dragged out of the originals. Our narrator is a pedant, and he felt obliged to introduce within his meager 250 pages a galaxy of references to earlier adventures, to all of Holmes traits and methods, and to some of the fascinating characters and animals that our author evidently feels were snubbed because they were mentioned only once in the original...
WHAT I FOUND out over the next several years was that discussion courses here usually conform to one of several types. First there is the Hollywood-Squares-With-Pedant-Moderator type, typified by a graduate seminar I took in the Department of S*******. I came across this course when I was going through a Great Name stage, when I was a Boswell looking for his Johnson, a neophyte looking to sit at the feet of some guru. I found my big name, but the course became more of a quiz show than an investigation of the sociological foundation of literature...
...community, he decided in the ninth grade to make a movie based on Edgar Allen Poe's elegaic prose poem Ligeia. Since then he's made a number of films, including a feature called Negatives when he was a freshman here. But it's strange. He's no cinema pedant--far from it, and he doesn't major in Visual Studies. He likes Hitchcock, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Blow-up, nothing fancy. Nothing experimental or avant-garde for him. He makes full-length feature films on commercial subjects and with big-name stars. One purpose of Counterpoint was to supplement...