Use pedantic in a sentence

The original, which is crabbed and pedantic, where it is not unintelligible from corruption, is here rendered with sufficient fidelity to the sense, but with such perspicuity, elegance, and sweetness, as to make Spenser's performance too good a poem to be called a translation.

Instead of insisting on that with pedantic obstinacy, look at its great achievements in the practical sphere, its furtherance of good and kindly feelings, its guidance in conduct, the support and consolation it gives to suffering humanity in life and death.

There, you have might as right, Feudalism and Fanaticism in close alliance, and in their train abominable ignorance and darkness of mind, a corresponding intolerance, discord of creeds, religious wars, crusades, inquisitions and persecutions; as the form of fellowship, chivalry, compounded of savagery and folly, with its pedantic system of ridiculous false pretences carried to an extreme, its degrading superstition and apish veneration for women.

It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym.

Although these pieces contain many passages of great interest, and of beautiful poetry, I know not, but they contributed more than even the subsequent homilies of Rowe, to chase natural and powerful expression of passion from the English stage, and to sink it into that maudlin, and affected, and pedantic style of tragedy, which haunted the stage till Shakespeare awakened at the call of Garrick.

If we consciously accept the fact that organized work will in future be the rule and unorganized work the exception, and if we deliberately adjust our methods of working as well as our personal ideals to that condition, we need no longer feel that the direction of public business must be divided between an uninstructed and unstable body of politicians and a selfish and pedantic bureaucracy.

These old cavaliers felt contempt for the young Frenchmen of the new era on account of their pedantic morality; they scornfully regarded men who perhaps had not more than one mistress, and to whom the wife of a friend was so sacred, that they never dared to approach her with a disrespectful thought even.

The result is that, though French patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull, common, and brutal, as is so often the strange fate of the nation of Bacon and Locke.

The thing he could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was the workmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans and extending their syllabic quantities measured according to the unchanging rule of a pedantic and dull prosody.

"These," said he, "you are aware, I suppose, when you form a connection with that man, you must renounce, and content yourself with a confinement to the tedious round of domestic duties, the pedantic conversation of scholars, and the invidious criticisms of a whole town."

Nor is this the worst of the case; for no sooner do they perpetrate one song, than they volunteer a dozen, interlarding the intervals between their performances with pedantic disquisitions on music, and flooring every man who ventures to hazard an opinion on the subject.

He prefers to give the proper French pronunciation to the words which he recognizes as French; and moreover as the possession of culture, or even of education, does not imply any knowledge of the history of English or of the principles which govern its growth, the men of culture are often inclined to pride themselves on this pedantic procedure.

To burlesque the pedantic lore displayed in certain American works, our historical sketch was to commence with the creation of the world; and we laid all kinds of works under contribution for trite citations, relevant or irrelevant, to give it the proper air of learned research.

There is a somewhat pedantic guess, drawn (it is said) from Iceland, that we got this national name ending from Scandinavia; so universal a habit would hardly have arisen from an admixture of Scandinavian blood received at the very close of the Dark Ages and affecting but small patches of North England.

The old government officials, when they came into direct contact with the governed population, showed themselves to be pedantic, and estranged from the practical working of life by their occupation at the green table; but they left behind them the impression of toiling honesty and conscientiously for justice.

Though by no means free from credulity, and dealing largely with trivial subjects of inquiry, the freshness and ingenuity of his mind invest everything he touches with interest; while on more important subjects his style, if frequently rugged and pedantic, often rises to the highest pitch of grave and stately eloquence.

Here the trees were arranged as on a chessboard, in straight and regular rows like ranks of soldiers, and this severe pedantic regularity, and the fact that all the trees were of the same size, and had tops and trunks all exactly alike, made them look monotonous and even dreary.

Pedantic and hypercritical, meddlesome and fault-finding, he was a terror to the clerks under him, whom he worried in their work, enforcing the rules rigorously, and arriving himself with such terrible punctuality that not one of them dared to be a moment late.

At a period when the bourgeoisie itself is playing the sheerest comedy, but in the most solemn manner in the world, without doing violence to any of the pedantic requirements of French dramatic etiquette, and is itself partly deceived by, partly convinced of, the solemnity of its own public acts, the adventurer, who took the comedy for simple comedy, was bound to win.

The recollection of the reign of Nicholas I., with its stern military regime, and minute, pedantic formalism, makes many Russians condemn in no measured terms the administration under which they live, and most Englishmen will feel inclined to endorse this condemnation.

They bring to their task an enthusiasm which was too often lacking in the "grand old fortifying classical curriculum"; but it is to be hoped that, as the importance of their subject becomes more and more recognized, they will achieve a method which will embody all that was valuable, while discarding much that was narrow and pedantic, in classical teaching.

The first, which may be styled the old school, consists in issuing daily, for the regulation of the movements of the army, general instructions filled with minute and somewhat pedantic details, so much the more out of place as they are usually addressed to chiefs of corps, who are supposed to be of sufficient experience not to require the same sort of instruction as would be given to junior subalterns just out of school.

My own opinion is that to pay too much attention to mere style and to endeavor to surpass that of other writers, is both trifling and pedantic, while any attempt to reproduce that of the unapproachable masterpieces of antiquity springs from a want of power to appreciate their real value.

By the aid of this inner light he was able to see truer and farther than his pedantic old master, with the result that the pupil would argue out questions with him on subjects connected with his lessons which subverted all discipline, and well-nigh reversed their relative positions.

His exuberant wit and humor reproved without wounding; he was not severe enough to be a public censor, nor pedantic enough to be the pedagogue of an age which often needed the lash rather than the gentle reproof, and upon which a merciful clemency lost its end if not its praises.

It has a hardening, deadening kind of influence; the more so, that the so-called mental cultivation frequently consists only of a pedantic heaping up of information, valuable indeed in itself, but wanting the principle of combination to make it useful.

He was in the early twenties, tall and robust, with a large round face, and with these peculiarities: that his hair, eyebrows, and lashes were perfectly white, his eyes of a singularly mild blue, his skin of a pinkish tint; that he was given to blushing whenever he met women or strangers, and that he spoke with pedantic preciseness, in a wondrously low voice.

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school: but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and pedantic in them; as by their name and authority they systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people.

The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system which they call a Constitution cannot be laid open without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it.

I believe that, if only we could shake off the fetters of a narrow and pedantic theory, and freely reshape our own system of import duties on principles of obvious common sense, we should be able at one and the same time to promote trade within the Empire, to strengthen our hands in commercial negotiations with foreign countries, and to render tardy justice to our home industries.

Kenyon not to let you see that book, it was not for the date, but because Coleridge's daughter was right in calling it a mere 'girl's exercise'; because it is just that and no more, ... no expression whatever of my nature as it ever was, ... pedantic, and in some things pert, ... and such as altogether, and to do myself justice (which I would fain do of course), I was not in my whole life.

Through all the work runs a mixture of pedantic stiffness and incoherence; it moves along in a desultory way, and suffers from abrupt checks in the course of its development and from superfluous ideas that break in for no reason at all, with the result that the whole hangs fire.

I could not help wondering, also, whether she did not shrink from being again, to a new generation and a wider class of readers, held up to cruel ridicule and condemnation as the cold-hearted, hard, pedantic prude, without sympathy for suffering or relenting toward repentance.

"Isn't there danger," I said, "of getting too fond of nature, of dissecting with so much enthusiasm that the pleasure of discovery may obscure one's feeling for pure beauty, of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest, of becoming pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of missing art in avoiding the artificial?"

Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ungrammatical, vague, and obscure.

However, as there are no books wherewith a foreigner can inform himself on this subject, any attempt at details would not only seem pedantic, but would be incomprehensible without tiresome explanations and many illustrations, which are not possible here.

It is evident that if women were generally held in as high esteem as men, it is altogether unlikely that the expression "superior to her sex" would have been employed, and the latter part of the sentence leads to the further inference that pretentious and pedantic women of the kind referred to were not altogether uncommon at this time.

Disgusted by the idle pretensions and stilted pedantry of the men of the schools, can we wonder if good and earnest men still refuse to acknowledge the high worth and dignity of art, which, in accordance with such definitions, would be nothing but a manifestation and studied application of the rules and laws of the limited and pedantic human understanding?

The Manna style and pedantic phrases were not meant for them; and, if they use them, the public will only say, 'would that they would remember that they are women and not men,' and they would only incur the reproach of being pedants, as many ladies, especially among the aristocracy, do.

There is nothing pedantic in the narrative, and the most serious themes and startling discoveries are treated with such charming naturalness and simplicity that boys and girls, as well as their seniors, will be attracted to the story, and find it difficult to lay it aside.

A new generation of professors arose who added fresh material to the storehouses, already overflowing, of pedantic erudition, and showed the utmost contempt for any fruit of other men's labor which might not square exactly with the utterances of the founders.

His early training had shown him merely the pedantic minutiae of Frederick's methods, and, in the absence of any troops capable of illustrating the real linear tactics, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the methods, which (more of necessity than from judgment) the French revolutionary generals had adopted, of fighting in small columns covered by skirmishers.

Her house, without any pedantic effort, had become the focus of a refined society, who, though obliged to show themselves for the moment in the great carnival, wear their masks, blow their trumpets, and pelt the multitude with sugarplums, were glad to find a place where they could at all times divest themselves of their mummery, and return to their accustomed garb of propriety and good taste.

This commission has been held by various kinds of author since the beginning of history, and manifold are the lessons that have been recommended to the world by their authority; now epic, now courtly and idealist lyric, romantic drama, pedantic tragedy, funeral orations, analytical novels.

It may be repeated here, to stand as the last words of the great Icelandic school; the school which went out and had no successor till all its methods were invented again, independently, by the great novelists, after ages of fumbling and helpless experiments, after all the weariness of pedantic chronicles and the inflation of heroic romance.

Given an interested community, the modern teacher can vitalize every feature of the school, changing the formal curriculum into an interesting and liberalizing interpretation of country life and the pedantic drills and tasks of instruction into a skillful ministry to real and abiding human wants.

Alliterations, puns, antithetical forms of expression lavishly employed where no corresponding opposition existed between the thoughts expressed, strained allegories, pedantic allusions, everything, in short, quaint and affected, in matter and manner, made up what was then considered as fine writing.

In truth, it would be as easy to persuade an educated Englishman that one of Johnson's Ramblers was the work of William Wallace as to persuade a man like Erasmus that a pedantic exercise, composed in the trim and artificial Attic of the time of Julian, was a despatch written by a crafty and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people alive many years before there existed a volume of prose in the Greek language.

The reason is that Dickens began it under his sudden emotional impulse of telling the whole truth about himself and gradually allowed the whole truth to be more and more diluted, until towards the end of the book we are back in the old pedantic and decorative art of Dickens, an art which we justly admired in its own place and on its own terms, but which we resent when we feel it gradually returning through a tale pitched originally in a more practical and piercing key.

Not one of those who, like signposts, stretch their wooden arms with pedantic insistence in a given direction, but one, rather, who, after the manner of the heavenly bodies, diffusing warmth and light and cheer, draws the young soul irresistibly to leave its dark jungles of prejudice and ignorance for the promised land of wisdom and freedom.

It was plain that an impassable gulf parted such a temper as this from the temper of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which the Tudors termed loyalty; for it was a temper not only legal, but even pedantic in its legality, intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law of the lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny, a temper of criticism, of judgement, and, if need be, of stubborn and unconquerable resistance.

Whether certain persons use a pious dialect, a learned (pedantic) dialect, a gambler's slang, a phraseology of excessive adjectives and silly expletives, or profane expressions, oaths, and phrases which abuse sacred things, depends on birth and training.

In this early stage proofs should not be given with pedantic fullness; definitely fallacious methods, such as that of superposition, should be rigidly excluded from the first, but where, without such methods, the proof would be very difficult, the result should be rendered acceptable by arguments and illustrations which are explicitly contrasted with demonstrations.

The impression thus made, however, was on Charles alone, and he was surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious as they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with which in themselves they had no power to cope.

In the nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose power showed itself in a gradual disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes, and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the Restoration.

Anna Reinhard was her friend, one of the few people in the world for whom she felt affection; but the pedantic words of the deformed girl often irritated her, and she found that spoken wisdom of Anna's infinitely wearisome, yet she was seldom querulous to her, partly because of the real affection she bore her, partly from a certain fear of the hunchback's quick wit and vehemence.

At a later period he might have been the leading character in some prolix and pedantic romance, and still more recently his life and deeds would have been built up into the scaffolding within which the historic novelist used to construct his love idylls, his tragic situations, or even his illustrations of some social theory.

William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not worthy.

That definite reflection is that if we had not had in us to some degree the root of the matter no method, however confessedly or aggressively "pedantic," would much have availed for us; and that since we apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches of virgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was an experience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity.

This form of definition is the most precise and least equivocal of any; but it is not brief enough, and is besides too technical and pedantic for common discourse.

It is not certain, but that, to a reader now, these very things constitute a redeeming attraction of his writings and relieve the mind of the unpleasant effects of his credulity and vanity, pedantic and often far-fetched references, palpable absurdities, and, sometimes, the repulsiveness of his topics and matter.

These follies are cultivated by a pedantic system of education, and by the accumulated literature which such education in the past has developed, feeble and faulty in style, superficial in conception, and sadly misleading as to the principles and purposes of life.

Harris, who is a very intelligent and useful citizen, but who has been so befogged by such studies as to suppose that his pedantic talk about syllogisms embodies an important contribution to philosophy, and indeed it was announced as such by his reporter.

He did not employ the terminology of the art, which, though possibly pedantic in sound, is invaluable for purposes of discussion; but he expressed its leading principles in pithy, homely phrases of his own, which showed how accurate his grasp of it was.

From signifying to superintend officially some application or infliction, administer passes by a natural transition to signify inflict, mete out, dispense, and blows, medicine, etc., are said to be administered: a usage thoroughly established and reputable in spite of pedantic objections.

Multitudes of girls and boys are learning to read and to speak German, French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of expatiating in the literature of a new language, purely because of a simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode of teaching these languages.

Latin and Greek are foully belied by the prejudices created by this technical, pedantic mode of teaching them, which makes one ragged, prickly bundle of all the dry facts of the language, and insists upon it that the boy shall not see one glimpse of its beauty, glory, or interest, till he has swallowed and digested the whole mass.

Before he became a public actor and dramatist, and served the court and fashionable society with his entertaining, if pedantic, masques, he had been student, tradesman, and soldier; he had traveled in Flanders and seen Paris, and wandered on foot through the length of England.

Cleverly disregarding his taciturnity she kept up a merry chatter as they rode along, finally drawing him skillfully into a discussion of the geological features of the interesting region which they were slowly traversing; like every mining expert he was a bit professionally pedantic on this subject, and to this woman of abnormally clear perceptions it was a positive pleasure to him to impart the really great information with which his mind was stored.

Happily for the variety of his creative genius on the English stage, no divorce had been proclaimed between the serious and the comic, and no division of species had been established such as he himself ridicules as pedantic when it professes to be exhaustive.

That article, crackling with anathema against the ignorance and irresponsibility of most modern journalism, and warm with generous and high notions of what constitutes the duty and privilege of the journalist, had about it a surprising flavor of detachment and idealism which recalled the famous Utopian schemes familiar in the pedantic idiom of scholars.

Such conversation, even among cavaliers of the highest quality, would appear to us more formal and pedantic than what we should meet with now in the society of poor schoolmasters; but even from this conversation, of which some accidental specimens remain to us, we may discover, in spite of a narrow point of view and numerous prejudices, the striving of the time for enlightenment and understanding of the world.

It had a pedantic sound when one looked at that smiling, rosy creature, who held the cards in her little hands with such charming awkwardness, forgot every instant what was the trump, laughed out from pure pleasure when she took a trick, and would be so truly disheartened when she lost.

They show notations referring to the master's petty expenses, which are recorded with painful exactitude as if coming from a pedantic and strictly parsimonious family father, while there is nothing to show that he spent greater sums, or that the artist was well versed in household management.

It has frequently been one of the curious features even of the most desperate civil struggles of the past, that while battles were raging all around, towns besieged, and thrones falling, commerce was at the same time being carried on as usual, wordy controversies on trivial alien subjects were being hotly discussed by opposing sections, as though their pedantic differences were the most serious matters in the world, and the ordinary details of everyday life were proceeding as before.

Finally, standing in her favorite place with her back to the fireplace, dabbing her eyes and steadying her voice, she began to talk huskily, with anger, and sarcasm, and looseness, puncturing her sometimes pedantic choice of words with one that was appropriate to a cab driver.

It contains much of the pedantic quaintness, the labored ornament, the cumbrous phraseology, which was the taste, the language of the day: but he had elegance of mind and tenderness of feeling; above all, he was in earnest, and accordingly, there are beautiful and brilliant things scattered through both his poetry and prose.

The accompanist of the troupe, a pedantic young pianist, afflicted with a chronic hoarseness, which alone prevented him from becoming a tenor of the first rank, formed the public to the beautiful duet, while he laughed loudly at every particularly poor witticism.

If, as was thought formerly, the poets were distinctly composing in an artificial dialect, into which they foisted forms from various dialects for the purpose of appearing learned in archaic language, we might fairly suspect such a pedantic school of playing tricks with manners and customs, and of omitting or accentuating as they fancied, in order to make an archaic picture according to their lights.

This poetry, obscene, equivocal, frivolous, horribly sincere, supplied a natural antithesis to the pseudo-platonic, pedantic, artificial mannerism of the purists.

She is in the first place the personification of scholastic theology, with all its subtle intricacy of pedantic method; she is in the second place the maiden to whom Dante sang his songs of love in Florence, and whose early death he wept disconsolate.

And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust.

A superficial and pedantic talker, incapable of any original conception, of any idea peculiar to himself, but very strong on commonplace, which he confounded with common sense, this illustrious philosopher learnedly prepared, for the use of the studious youth of France, a metaphysical dish of his own making, the use of which, made compulsory in all schools of the State under the University, condemned several generations one after the other to a cerebral indigestion.

Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees before her instead of being the pedantic young master.

His Grammar did enormous services to the cause of unification, ultimately winning over the resisting south; but he carried his purism to pedantic lengths, he would tolerate no archaic or dialectical words, no unusual forms or constructions, and consequently made the language unsuited for poetry.

He covered the table in his little corner with a pedantic air of importance, opened a book, lighted two candles, muttered some mysterious words, and clothed himself in a kind of chasuble, striped, and with sleeves, which he preserved carefully at the bottom of his trunk.

Towards eleven o'clock nearly all the expected guests having arrived, and the ground became a lively scene as the gay and well-mounted equestrians cantered in laughing and merry groups backwards and forwards; some few, more exhilarated or pedantic than the rest, trying the course and the mettle of their steeds.

It is indeed probable that had not the Institution been first written by its author in Latin, and afterwards translated by him, it might have had less dignity and vigor; but it must at the same time be remembered that this process of composition was at least equally likely, in the hands of any but a great genius, to produce a heavy and pedantic style neither French nor Latin in character.

One could see this during the great discussion on the constitution of the Executive Power; never did the different parties display more visibly the pedantic hypocrisy which induces them to conceal their interests beneath their ideas: an ordinary spectacle enough, but more striking at this time than usual, because the needs of the moment compelled each party to shelter itself behind theories which were foreign or even opposed to it.

When one turns over the leaves of a volume of this kind, and sees the way in which the avenue to learning and knowledge was hampered by pedantic and ignorant instructors, it seems marvelous, not that the spread of education was so slow and partial, but that so many scholars should have emerged from such a process.

Pedantic and ponderous, deeply read in curious historical lore, in many ways he was not characteristic of the far west, but in the coarse vigor with which he bore down opposition by abuse, and in the far horizon line of the policies he advocated, he thoroughly represented its traits.

In the following account of his visit to Bologna we get a vivid idea of his manner of appeal to the people; and of their enthusiasm and astonishment that this poor and seemingly illiterate man, the very antithesis of the pedantic clergy, should have the power to hold and sway an audience by the magic of his words.

If the supposed inaccessible excellence of Dante and his contemporaries dispirited the Italians of the fifteenth century from the cultivation of the higher Italian poetry, it proved not that they had exhausted Nature, but that they were no longer understood; and that they were not, almost every line of their pedantic commentators proves.

He knows men not merely as they are represented in books, but as they actually are; he knows them not only as they exist in a provincial sphere, narrowed by petty interests and trammeled by pedantic opinion, but as they exist in the freest community of the world, where boundless ambition and enterprise find full scope.

It is not by mere assertion, or the use of obscure and pedantic language, that such a theory can be established; and if it can be shown that the arguments on which it is based are shallow and speculative, words can scarcely be found too strong to censure the recklessness and folly of those who promulgate views so subversive of all morality and religion.

From these observations on the collateral and unsolicited beauties which must branch out from the primary expression of every great idea, it will not, I hope, be suspected, that I mean to invalidate the necessity of its unity, or to be the advocate of pedantic subdivision.

And Schopenhauer is the least pedantic, and yet the most luminous of ciceroni: in pages which Hugo would not disavow, and of which the foregoing analysis can give at best but a bald and unsatisfactory idea, he explains each height and ruin with an untiring verve, and with an irony as keen and fundamental as Swift's.

Be this as it may, the inaccuracies and doubts discussed in the appendix are, on the whole, of such slight import, that those readers who do not wish to be interrupted by pedantic quibbles will be well advised if they simply read straight on, without heeding the figures in the text.

The objective, unconscious, pleasantly sensuous mind of the Greek, becoming a man, as he thinks, and putting away childish thoughts, is come with Zeno one step towards Aristotle, towards Aquinas, or shall we say into the rude scholasticism of the pedantic Middle Age?

Eve employs the term "seeded," and remarks of it: "This being one of the numerous instances of pedantic, because unnecessary distinction, which showed marks of decadence; for both forms occur at the same period, and adorn the same object, evidently with the same intention."