Word: pedantics
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Parson Weems has been remembered by generations of Americans only as the man -presumably a dust-dry, thin-lipped little pedant-who invented or at least popularized the most famous lie in U.S. history: the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. As revived by Van Wyck Brooks in The World of Washington Irving, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems appears to have been an attractive and useful citizen. A cheerful, ruddy-faced clergyman who had given up his parish to become a book agent (the Episcopal Church in the South was demoralized after the Revolution), Parson Weems...
...wise and witty pedant: a lover of Greek verses, a professor of rhetoric, a biographer of Beethoven. He was the rotund trencherman: in the piping days of peace, he lunched on soup, a couple of trout, a partridge, vegetables, dessert, cheese and two bottles of Burgundy. He was a Gallic sentimentalist: cartoonists loved to draw him as a transparent body with half-a-dozen hearts. In politics he stood left of center, where the heart belongs, the leader of the Radical Socialists. In statesmanship he fell heir to Briand's mantle; he preached the gospel of a United States...
...Frederick Paul Keppel, 68, from 1923 to 1941 president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation, onetime Dean of Columbia College (1910-18); of a heart attack; in Manhattan. As the amiable, skeptical disburser of the income from Andrew Carnegie's steel-extracted $135,000,000, Keppel acted in the pedant-peppering spirit which prompted his 1938 blast at the "mysteries . . . rites . . . ceremonials. . . of the Ph.D. degree...
...longings turning to frustrations and regrets. The three Prozoroff sisters and their brother Andrey live discontentedly in a dull provincial town. Olga, the eldest (Judith Anderson), is already half-doomed to schoolteaching and spinsterhood. Masha, the second sister (Katharine Cornell), is a bored neurotic married to a fatuous pedant. Irina, the youngest (Gertrude Musgrove), still high-spiritedly dreams of romance. Brother Andrey (Eric Dressier), an intellectual weakling, still dabbles with the idea of a Moscow professorship. They all have one thing in common: a desire to go to gay, brilliant, cultured Moscow-a symbol as well as a city...
...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...