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Use pedantic in a sentence

Definition of pedantic:

  • (adjective) marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects

Sentence Examples:

It is not always easy to say the right word to a little fellow who has the right on his side and needs to have the other side shown to him, too; he is terribly pedantic besides, and says that one can't sing a morning song in the evening, and when he began to wail in his helplessness, it made me miserable.

Now in the fresh morning sunlight he presented rather the appearance of a pedantic schoolmaster, an impression which was increased by the masterful, and yet benevolent, smile with which he regarded me.

By all means let the economist and psychologist avoid a pedantic specialism and let each stray into the other's province whenever he thinks fit.

He was not more possessed of knowledge, than he was communicative of it; but then, his communication of it was by no means pedantic, or imposed upon the conversation, but just such, and went so far, as by the natural turns of the discourse in which he was engaged, it was necessarily prompted, or required.

The Due de Broglie seems to be a pedantic coxcomb.

Do not fancy that he was one of those stiff, bespectacled, pedantic youths who cannot open their lips without a classic allusion or a Greek quotation; nothing could be farther from the truth.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

It is also true that the Government, having refused to do this, subsequently, in view of the arguments urged by a deputation of cricket enthusiasts, agreed to do so, since it has always set its face against any pedantic rigidity of purpose.

The pedantic attempt made by some writers to change the common way of writing it because the original Malay term is a single word, "amok," comes too late in view of Dryden's line, "And runs an Indian muck at all he meets."

You may not like German learning or German art, and consider the one pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired.

Even our noble Sidney allowed his modesty to be overawed by the pedantic tradition, though as a man of the world he tactfully gave it the slip.

Scholarship had pined away into pedantic purism.

It is difficult to think of the soul of Rabelais in connection with a pedantic and uxorious Unitarian.

A single sheet of greasy note paper, a collection of pedantic antiquated phrases, penned laboriously with the scrawling hand of one unused to writing; but incontrovertible in its laconic directness.

Further, so long as the pedantic objection to the introduction of new technical terms continues, accurate thinkers on moral and political subjects are limited to a very scanty vocabulary for the expression of their ideas.

An axiom which I have heard confidently set forth, that a picture is worth nothing unless "he who runs may read," has inundated the world with frivolous and pedantic criticism.

You know, for one thing, that I was not always poor, nor always a professor of philosophy, nor a scribbler of pedantic articles for a living.

It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr Johnson.

Barring this, accept my sympathies, for I am not pedantic enough to blame thieves.

One cannot altogether admire the style; it is inflated, pedantic, written, I fear, with a considerable consciousness that he was saying the right thing and in the very finest way: but still it is a prayer.

James, pusillanimous and pedantic son of Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the throne as the first of the sinister Stuarts, and, truckling to vindictive Spain, threw Raleigh into prison under suspended sentence of death.

There is not so impudent a thing in nature as the saucy look of an assured man confident of success: the pedantic arrogance of a very husband has not so pragmatical an air.

I cannot but sympathize with him about hero-worship; for I, too, have had my fits of rage at the stupid irreverence of little minds, which also is made a parade of by the pedantic and the worldly.

She was not one of those wonderful inventions, a girl who can meet a man's eyes with a steady stare, and for the first few minutes after their hostess left them she only noticed that her new acquaintance looked and spoke like a gentleman, that he had a very pleasant voice, and that, without being pedantic, he was not talking nonsense.

In fact the learning of which they were proud was knowledge of the body of tradition on whose sanctity they insisted; their teaching was scholastic and pedantic, an endless citing of precedents and discussion of trifles.

I return to find all the prettiest women running to lectures on subjects which they never can understand, and scarifying the men's nerves with pedantic allusions.

Some of these later gained the reputation of being rather dry and pedantic; they certainly were far from comprehending the romantic trend of the impressionable new pupil, for they tried to curb his originality and square it with rules and customs.

And this it is which you wise, pedantic people stigmatize as blameworthy and abominable.

Supplemented by elucidations and extensions, it served an admirable purpose in introducing my students to the things really worth knowing in modern history, without confusing them with masses of pedantic detail.

Among these was the Vice-Governor, a gentleman of German origin, and therefore more inclined to be pedantic than a genuine Russian.

The schools and colleges were pedantic, complacent, smug and self-satisfied; by giving in a few points they had absorbed the radicals, and the political protesters had been bought off with snug places in the excise.

He wittily calls her "the widow of sound learning," and again, "a constellation of pedantic, obstinate ignorance and presumption, mixed with a clownish incivility that would tax the patience of Job."

Everything dry, petty, pedantic, connected with German ways, which had often made many of us impatient with ourselves, was suddenly swept away by the storm of these days.

And the shaggy man of egotistic and pedantic speech, but of womanly sensibilities, was weeping.

The arrival of Frederick William had kindled a flame of devotion which perplexed that modest and rather pedantic ruler.

Her influence as yet was that of a noble, fascinating woman, who softened the jars occasioned by the King's narrow and pedantic nature, and purified the Court from the grossness of the past.

"He's a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb," said Will, with gnashing impetuosity.

Still it was from an imperfect recollection of what he had acquired during this pacific period, that he drew his sources of conversation when in company with women; in other words, his language became pedantic when it ceased to be military.

The reader, I hope, will not think me either pedantic or supercilious if I insist that no word is more misused by the newspapers, indeed by the whole modern world, than this word statesmanship.

In the court of Nero, a person of learning, of unquestioned merit, and of unsuspected loyalty, was put to death for no other reason, than that he had a pedantic countenance which displeased the emperor.

If we discard the Federal solution we must discard it wholeheartedly, not from a pedantic love of logic, but to avoid real, practical anomalies which might cause the whole political machine to work even worse than it does at present.

Amid much that is now considered pedantic and artificial, and which, in those faults, marks the age, are to be found as striking and truthful delineations of English life and society in that day as Chaucer has given us of an earlier period.

And yet, to talk too much about books is not well; it often marks the pedantic and egotistic character.

She calls the members of the society proud, haughty, and exclusive, and denounces the city where these people live as pedantic, disagreeable, and unsocial.

The Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use, but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic.

Astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and poetry swarmed with puns, alliterations, pedantic allusions; they were overladen with irrelevant notes and interwoven with quaint and strained interpretations.

He was not a handsome or a charming fellow, but a good-natured, agreeable, refined man, a fine conversationalist, persuasive, enthusiastic and alert; learned without being pedantic, a man who could inspire in a young girl a perfect passion.

Few of my readers, I suspect, but have long been persuaded that James I. was a mere college pedant, and that all his works, whatever they maybe, are monstrous pedantic labors.

Some rather pedantic critics have found fault with the term, as the "plane" in question is of course really a sphere entirely surrounding the physical globe, but as all occultists understand the word, "plane" simply signifies a condition of nature.

Nor have I, either, been guilty of the more pardonable folly, of treating the new feeling after the pedantic fashions and instances of the world.

If his poems are sometimes finical and pedantic, his prose is quite free from affectation.

The inhabitants of the neighboring town were somewhat astonished at these new manners, and looked upon them as pedantic, while there was nothing in this game, but a resource against the monotony of solitude.

I think she even preferred an unobtrusive indifference to a pedantic accuracy, which, she said, few people appreciated, and which, if anything, rather took the attention from the acting than added to its effect, when it was really fine.

What a pedantic outcry about German want of adaptability for singing!

His failings, obvious enough, were the results of a strong and somewhat pedantic individuality ceaselessly at conflict with unpropitious circumstances.

Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids, ready with one of his more pedantic interpellations; but Moses Gould suddenly struck his forefinger on his nose, with an expression of extreme astonishment and intelligence in his brilliant eyes.

No word that was considered vulgar or coarse was allowed to pass muster; and though in process of time this censorship became pedantic and petty, there is no doubt that much was done to purify both the language and the tone of thought.

We all think "pedantic popinjays" simply splendid.

A clear and correct enunciation is essential, but it should not be pedantic, nor should it attract attention to itself.

Her fine temper, he said to himself, was a trifle cold and conscious, her purity prudish, perhaps, her culture pedantic.

Alas, these words are but pedantic and rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism.

To call him a spider of hell was not only indecent in itself, but perfectly foolish, from the term being totally inapplicable to the object, and fit only for the very pedantic eloquence of the person who used it.

Johnson's style was grand, and Gibbon's elegant: the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantic, and the latter was occasionally finical.

Allan acceded to the request, but received only a moderate share of praise from the pedantic antiquary.

We are not pedantic enough to dispute with the use of language about this little misapplication, our observation is only intended to remove wrong objections.

Instead of becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has grown more bewildered.

Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly the same.

Cromwell seems to have been but a pedantic hanger-on of literary circles.

For, despite the ferment which was spreading in the realms of theology, of politics, and of natural science, the Dons still taught their classics in the dry pedantic manner of the past, and refused to face the problems of the nineteenth century.

They have in good degree given up the pedantic follies of Latin versification and Hebrew orations.

When the originals are available it seems to me pedantic and academic to put into print the comic mispronunciations of well-known words by old and uneducated seamen.

Their manners are easy, dignified, and lady-like; totally free from all affectation, and in nowise marked by that frigid stateliness and pedantic formality, which a censorious world proverbially attributes to a state of elderly maidenhood.

It is a pedantic literalism contrary to experience and to common sense.

His language, from long study, had been borrowed from books, more than from men and when he entered upon his favorite science of natural history, his enthusiasm made him more pedantic in his style and pompous in his phraseology than ever.

They may be named by different appellations; but considering the enormous weight of historical tradition behind these names it would seem absurd and pedantic to attempt to re-baptize them at this late hour.

While he deals with abstract thought or moral truth his handling is tight, pedantic, and disagreeably hard.

He spoke with an oracular and pedantic assurance which challenged the girl's mischief afresh.

He was an excellent conversationalist; humorous without being cynical, scholarly without being pedantic, and showing especial familiarity with history and the natural sciences.

It is a brilliant specimen of the pedantic pottering of the learned body which enables me to append to my name the A.S.S., fraudulently inverted into S.S.A.

In order to make these matters as concrete and practical as possible, we shall give in the remainder of this chapter a series of somewhat unrelated suggestions about conducting an ensemble rehearsal, trusting that the reader will forgive the didactic (and possibly pedantic) language in which they are couched.

He spoke with the precise and rather pedantic accent of an old gentleman nurtured on the classics, and produced upon me a distinct impression of age and serious demeanor utterly different from the rollicking, not too refined "Wilbur."

Surely it is a childish or pedantic misinterpretation to represent this as egoism, whether armed or not with keen sight; and still worse to talk of it as over-throwing the barriers that keep in the throng of selfish appetites.

We see him afterwards in the pages of Pepys, an uninteresting, prosaic, pedantic figure, usefully employed in scientific experiments, and with all the gilt washed off him by time and years and the commonplace wear and tear of routine life.

The pedantic rigor of Byzantine scholarship was little favorable to the poetry of emotion, and the spoken language had now fallen so far apart from the literary idiom that only scholars were capable of writing in the old classical forms.

The reverend gentleman who edits the series is a type himself, full of pedantic and pedagogic learning, anxious always to show off his knowledge of the classics, and solemn and serious ever as a veritable owl.

He placed him as a very ordinary German, a common type in the Fatherland, simple-minded, pedantic, inquisitive, and a prodigious bore withal but dangerous, for of this stuff German discipline kneads militarists.

He had enjoyed high fame as an orator, though his diction, formed on models anterior to the civil wars, was, towards the close of his life, pronounced stiff and pedantic by the wits of the rising generation.

Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is a genuine lyric cry; but when in her poverty she practiced authorship as a trade, while she wins our respect as a mother, the poetess is too often at once facile and pedantic.

He wastes in the routine where he ought to economize, and is pedantic in the great schemes in which his imagination ought to be unbridled.

The prince was young, virtuous, and amiable; the earl was in the prime of mature manhood, pedantic, gay, courtly in bearing, and winning in deportment.

It is a pedantic scholasticism set forth with fanatical rant.

The deadly seriousness of their piffling, pedantic talk about fine-spun scholastic points that were not interesting nor useful a thousand years ago, and much less now that they are absolutely dead.

Persisted Latimer, who was rather prolix and pedantic in his talk.

It had escaped my memory (though I think I may say honestly that I knew it well enough) when I passed the sheet: but it seemed to me that perhaps some readers, who do not care much for "parallel passages" in the pedantic sense, might, like myself, feel pleasure in having the great things of literature, in different places, brought together.

Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his own Ethical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these, in tiresome, pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Lamb, we must beg leave to cry off!

It is a triumphant refutation of the opinions of those who, to the vast injury of literature, and serious inconvenience of men of letters, slight common sense and real utility in favor of visionary schemes and pedantic elaboration.

How much time and money have been spent in colleges to produce this pedantic perversion of the mind, to create that love of the ignorance of antiquity and indifference to modern enlightenment which are so common among the college-educated classes.

Here we have myths that were perhaps originally popular tales, and are probably old; here again, we have later legends that certainly were conceived in the narrow minds of a pedantic and ceremonious priesthood.

"Quondam" was rather a pity, perhaps; it sounds pedantic, and the Warden was no pedant, unless he wanted to snub people.

Ruth stopped her reading to talk to him, and, in a few minutes, had completely dumbfounded him with her pedantic replies, which fell from lips as luscious and unformed as an infant's.