Word: pedantic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...history, both ancient and modern, and includes a decayed family of vulpine, voracious aristocrats who are scram bling madly for possession of a disputed inheritance; an oily industrialist who is patiently plotting to marry his fatuous daughter to the family's weak-minded young heir; a bumbling, gentle pedant who is complacently gloating over a fortune to which he does not yet have legal title, and as lusty a collection of blackmailers, murderers, police inspectors, political agitators and petty shopkeepers as are likely to appear outside the pages of Dickens. Like Dickens, Griffin leans rather too heavily on coincidence...
...Buff & Pedant. One of the busiest and best is Bruce Catton. Catton published his first Civil War book in 1951, when he was 52, but he has since made up for lost time. This new book, which completes a Civil War-centennial trilogy begun ten years ago, is his tenth on the subject. Together, they have sold 2,449,008 copies in hard cover and an additional 1,189,540 in paperbacks...
...addict knows all there is to know about the Civil War, and impatiently awaits the next title so that he can begin the exhilarating task of exposing the author's−any author's−bad judgment. Catton too is a buff; more buff, perhaps, than pedant. And because he is, he makes an ideal guide...
Funk made the entire nation self-conscious about its vocabulary. For 20 years he turned out a monthly column on vocabulary building for the Reader's Digest, and he wrote innumerable books: 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, 25 Magic Steps to Word Power. No pedant, he praised Walter Winchell for adding phffft to the language, and H. L. Mencken for contributing booboisie. "Simple and clear expression," he said, "is usually the difference between a sizzle and a fizzle...
CAESAR & CLEOPATRA (Caedmon) is more than a little like Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. For the tyrannical pedant of phonetics, Henry Higgins, Shaw substitutes the philosopher-king of Rome. In place of the forlorn flower girl who must be passed off as a lady, the play offers an adolescent Egyptian minx who must be tutored in regality. The playwright's purposes are somewhat thwarted by this recording. Max Adrian is little better than a fashionably tailored verbal dandy, and an overagitated Claire Bloom is more often short of breath than breathless...