Pedant

From Freepedia

A pedant is a person who overrates or overuses book learning or pure technical knowledge. Such a person values simple knowledge (in the form of often obscure facts and rules) over common sense and more general knowledge.

Some pedants are ostentatious in their pedantry, as if displaying their knowledge, and pointing out the errors of others, gives them great pleasure. Such pedants would be more likely to expound at length on subjects, taking every opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of their knowledge.

Some pedants are simply nit-pickers, people who are annoyed by what they see as egregious errors. They take no pleasure in correcting your mistakes, yet they cannot let such mistakes go uncorrected. Such pedants will correct your pronunciation in conversation, and the bolder (or less socially adept) pedant might even correct your use of grammar while you converse with another person.

The on-line community has spawned a whole new breed of pedants, allowing free platform for ostentatious pedants to hold forth, and ample opportunity for the nit-pickers to comb for trivial errors that seek correction.

Being called a pedant, or pedantic, is considered insulting. People who wish to make a correction often preface it with "not wishing to be pedantic, but ..." or "without being a pedant, ..." in order to indicate that the correction is made in good spirit and implies no criticism.

Pedantry can come about as the overzealous application of intellectual rigour, but equally can just be an annoying habit brought on by lack of social interaction.

Pedantry can also be an indication of certain developmental disorders. In particular those suffering from Asperger Syndrome, or Higher Functioning Autism, often have behavior characterized by pedantic speech [1]. Those with Asperger tend to obsess over the minutiae of subjects, and are prone to giving long detailed expositions, and the related corrections, and may gravitate to careers in academia or science where such obsessive attention to detail is often rewarded.

Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder is also in part characterized by a form of pedantry that is overly concerned with the correct following of rules, procedures and practices.[2] Sometimes the rules that OCPD sufferers obsessively follow are of their own devising, or are corruptions or re-interpretations of the letter of actual rules.

Quotes

• "A Man who has been brought up among Books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is what we call a Pedant. But, methinks, we should enlarge the Title, and give it to every one that does not know how to think out of his Profession and particular way of Life." - Addison, Spectator 1711. [3]
• "Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another." - Desiderius Erasmus [4]
• "Now that you ask, Lois, I find this meatloaf rather shallow and pedantic" - Peter Griffin, Family Guy. (After Thomas Macaulay.)