Word: pedantic
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Rarely has the Supreme Court of the U.S. known a richer personality than Mr. Justice Felix Frankfurter. "F.F.," as he was known to his brethren, grated on some of them as a hyperactive pedant: he charmed others as the most rewarding friend of their lives. He was insatiably curious; he knew everyone, read everything. He talked incessantly -warm, wise, witty words about everything under the sun. Dean Acheson said of him: "One needs to see, to hear-particularly to hear his laugh, his general noisiness-to realize what an obstreperous person this man is, to have...
Still, the professor was no pedant. A China-born Southerner, he was the son of a Methodist missionary and the grandson of Nathan B. Forrest's chief of staff; he came to Dartmouth in 1913 after teaching in Brazil and ranching in California. For three decades, Lambuth asked only that students think hard and write straight, looking to such models as Belloc, Conrad, Chesterton and the English Bible. "Clear thinking and not a mastery of rules and a memory full of difficulties is what makes good writing," Lambuth summed up. "If you have a nail...
...general, the editors seem aware only of those few faults of academicism that they directly discuss. Certainly, they have not eliminated the loose, repetitious writing so prevalent in universities or the pretentious phrases incorrectly used. Nor do they reject the pedant's tone of self-conscious enlightment...
...actual. Especially prized in his own time was his 16-piece series of figures from the commedia dell' arte, the endless, semi-improvised popular comedy in which stock characters mimicked Europe's manners and morals, and lack of them (see color). There was Il Dottore, the gulled pedant; Mezzetino, the capering servant; Octavio, the youthful courtier; Scaramouche, the blustering rogue. Bustelli placed them in theatrical stances on curvilinear pedestals that swept up in rococo curlicues to counterbalance the curves and bends of the figures...
...surprisingly, her hero, Matthew Pryar (Eton and Oxford), contributes some British one-upmanship to the stock drama of poet and pedant. He finds that all is alien corn on the Cobb campus, is daunted to learn that the faculty does not drink and dines on unspiced food at 6:30 p.m. Pryar is one among seven visiting fellows. Each of them is a distinguished specialist in some recondite field, or rather is a monomaniac locked inside an ever-narrowing preoccupation -Andean Spiolus, patristic hagiography among the Slavs, Emily Dickinson or whatever. These learned freaks (the Slavonic specialist is a midget...