Pedantry
Excessive concern with unimportant details
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pedantry (/ˈpɛd.ən.tri/ PED-ən-tree) is an excessive concern with formalism, minor details, and rules that are not important, such as concerns over grammar mistakes.[1][2]
Etymology
Pedantry is the adjective form of the 1580s English word pedant, which meant a male schoolteacher at the time.[3] The word pedant originated from the French word for "schoolmaster", pédant, in the 1560s, or from the Italian word for "teacher, schoolmaster", pedante.[4][5] Both of these words are likely an alteration of Late Latin word paedagogantes. The pejorative meaning of a "person who trumpets minor points of learning... or lays undue stress on exact knowledge of details" comes from the 1590s.[6] In ancient Greece, a paedagogus was a slave entrusted with teaching young Roman boys.
Analysis
Ultimately, pedantry could be viewed as an attempt to show superiority by appearing more intelligent, through tasks as simple as correcting a peer's grammar online.[7][medical citation needed][neutrality is disputed] Fowler's Concise Dictionary of Modern English (1926) recognised that the term pedantry was "relative" and subjective, stating "my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, and someone else's ignorance".[8]
