Word: pedant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...best newsmen in the business. A graduate of Franklin College (1910), he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Then he worked ten years on the New York Times as reporter and editorial writer. He quit to freelance, wrote popular fiction. Scholarly in tone and appearance, he is no pedant. When the Saturday Review of Literature carried a weighty article on Indiana authors some years ago, he wrote a dour reply: Indiana's greatest contribution to culture was unquestionably the late Cinemactress Carole Lombard...
Such examples of dictionary style make Columbia University's famed Psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike wince. No pedant, Dr. Thorndike decided a few years ago to write a dictionary that most of its users could understand. He started by counting words to see which were used oftenest. Then his assistant, Dr. Irving Lorge, made a record of how the words were used, compiled an English semantic count which ranked each word's meanings in order of frequency. To give his dictionary authority, Dr. Thorndike employed 28 eminent scholars as consultants...
This week modern Greece had, for better or worse, stepped out of her comic-opera role. Greece was full in the path of huge events. In a debate at the Oxford Union during his exile George once said: "Instinctively I distrust the professor and the pedant. Give me a burly man of bone and gristle." This week the men of bone were...