"The haughty pedant, swoln with frothy name
Of learned man, big with his classic fame,
A thousand books read o're and o're again,
Does word for word most perfectly retain,
Heap'd in the lumber-office of his brain;
Yet this crammed skull, this undigested mass,
Does very often prove an arrant ass."
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, "The Fourth Satire" (1687)
The word pedant was first used among the French to name a man charged with the instruction of children. A pedant was no different than a pedagogue. But by the sixteenth century the word pedant had become the epithet of a poser who was stuffed to the tonsils with a mishmash of inexact, superficial, and ostentatious learning. Montagne tells us that farcical plays of that day always brought a pedant in "for the fool of the play," since there is no fool so farcical as a fool who pretends he is wise. Continue reading "Profiles in Pedantry, a Guide to Learned Braggarts, Learned Bullies, and Learned Bores."
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