Word: pedantic
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...Spoto's, remind you of the biographer's trudge through library morgues and dead-end interviews. Sturges' film world was so open to American experience that even a bartender, asked for a special concoction, could exclaim, "Sir, you rouse the artist in me!" In Spoto, Sturges hardly rouses the pedant. Fact is, though, Hollywood frequently roused the artist in its cynical convoy of screenwriters...
...looms as a haunting menace. Set in the '60s and '70s, Lewis Percy is buffeted by the winds of fads. Tissy becomes a support-group feminist ("Last week they got to know their bodies. This week they're getting in touch with the pain"), and his boss is a pedant of the new linguistics ("only deconstruct...
...present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma -- unless it be breath itself...
...razor lay crossed." Yet there is a strained relationship. Buck begins Joyce's stream of subversive epiphanies with a mockery of religious ritual, and Pat launches Thomas Flanagan's The Tenants of Time with a polite spoof on the rituals of orthodox history. Prentiss is a young Irish pedant, fresh out of New College, Oxford, and itching to write a book about a failed nationalist uprising in 1867. The final skirmish, known as the Battle of Clonbrony Wood, has become exaggerated in story and barroom ditty: "Let all true Irishmen be good,/ And fight for what they hold./ Like...
Stripped of its apocalyptic tone, what this amounts to is an advocacy of teaching names, dates and places by rote and providing a context later. Hirsch acknowledges that the method has been derided since Dickens satirized Pedant Thomas Gradgrind ("Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!") in Hard Times. But, he counters, "it isn't facts that deaden the minds of young children, who are storing facts in their minds every day with astonishing voracity. It is incoherence -- our failure to ensure that a pattern of shared, vividly taught, and socially enabling knowledge will emerge from our instruction...