Pedantry

A pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes a show of his or her learning.

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.
  • Joseph Addison, Spectator 1711. [1]

• Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgements of one another.
  • Desiderius Erasmus [2]

• The term, then, is obviously a relative one: my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education and someone else’s ignorance.
  • H. W. Fowler, Modern English Usage