Word: pedant
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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...
...Hillyer is a man who has long held that the roots of true poetry are thrust deep in the traditions of centuries. His is not the frigid, classical view of the pedant, however, for he knows that poetry changes with the decades. But poetry to him is sacred, and in an age of frantic, formless compositions whose only worth lies in the white heat at which they are forged, Mr. Hillyer's poetry strikes a sure note. A sincere consideration of "A Letter to Robert Frest and Others" proves that Mr. Hillyer's poetry will stand the test of time...
...here and there until 5:30 whereupon by water--where I did meet a few of the boxing team who were still a little punch drunk--to Cambridge. And I was glad at my heart to learn that Professor Kittredge on Wednesday is speaking at Dunster House on "the Pedant...
...presence at Harvard of truly brilliant men can lend intellectual vigor to all these who come into contact with them. No more now than ever does Harvard or any other University, we hope, have lasting use for the dried as dust pedant who can get along amiably enough with books but not at all with people or life in the world outside...