Word: pedantical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma -- unless it be breath itself...
...razor lay crossed." Yet there is a strained relationship. Buck begins Joyce's stream of subversive epiphanies with a mockery of religious ritual, and Pat launches Thomas Flanagan's The Tenants of Time with a polite spoof on the rituals of orthodox history. Prentiss is a young Irish pedant, fresh out of New College, Oxford, and itching to write a book about a failed nationalist uprising in 1867. The final skirmish, known as the Battle of Clonbrony Wood, has become exaggerated in story and barroom ditty: "Let all true Irishmen be good,/ And fight for what they hold./ Like...
Stripped of its apocalyptic tone, what this amounts to is an advocacy of teaching names, dates and places by rote and providing a context later. Hirsch acknowledges that the method has been derided since Dickens satirized Pedant Thomas Gradgrind ("Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!") in Hard Times. But, he counters, "it isn't facts that deaden the minds of young children, who are storing facts in their minds every day with astonishing voracity. It is incoherence -- our failure to ensure that a pattern of shared, vividly taught, and socially enabling knowledge will emerge from our instruction...
...doctrine has wisely found more in Poloniua than a silly buffoon When he talks Laertes eats off with a string of maxims for living, this bespectacled pedant warns against dressing gaudily and rips a pendant from around his son's neck. As he presses on with his list, we see Ophelia, sitting at his feet, silently mouthing the words along with him, having obviously heard the advice a dozen times; Polonius notices the mockery and gives her a playful cuff. Doctrice also doubles amusingly as the First Gracedigger...
Frank. Almost as sad as Lilly. A loyal, ungainly homosexual, a cynic and pedant who ends up as a successful literary agent...