Word: pedants
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...kernels of political meaning, and carried on not-so-innocent satires of human pomposity. Phineas T. Bridgeport, the Barnum of bears, orated in billboard letters that burlesqued hucksterism everywhere. "Nuclear physics ain't so new and it ain't so clear," declared Rowland Owl, a bedraggled Perelmanesque pedant. Churchy LaFemme, a poetic turtle, reveled in alliterative aubades: "Whence that wince, my wench?" At Christmas time, Albert the cigar-smoking alligator led his Okefenokee swamp singers in newly shined carols: Deck us all with Boston Charlie/ Walla Walla, Wash, and Kalamazoo...
Spirit. This is revisionist history carried to the most amiable extreme. It bears a distant relationship to George MacDonald Eraser's superb Flashman memoirs. But while Eraser has produced some remarkable light entertainment, Sobel has manufactured an obsessive parlor game. He is a master pedant who, without cracking a smile, plods through heavily footnoted mock details of North America's internal and external struggles from 1775 to the present. Indeed, there is so much beady-eyed detail that a reader can argue as well about the C.N.A.'s 1966 election (Carter Monaghan, of the People...
...Flies. An unpopular Latin teacher nicknamed "Old Lash" (James Mason) is certain that all the trouble is caused by his colleague Dobbs (Robert Preston), whom he describes as a "malevolence" and an "obscenity." Dobbs, however, is beloved of all the boys and Lash heartily despised as an overbearing, paranoid pedant. The bitter rivalry between the two teachers leads eventually to madness, suicide and the equivocal triumph of evil, at least as far as the Code and Rating Administration will allow...
Pale Fire was Vladimir Nabokov's triumphant literary joke about the attempts of a mad pedant to write about the life and work of a poet whom he barely knew and whose qualities eluded him completely. The book seemed to be the very last laugh at the extremes of the New Criticism-destructive works of literary detection, prolix biographies, and any number of other sins against common sense and the simple enjoyment...
Mars Bars. The caprifoliaceous translations are better clues to Nabokov's whereabouts. As a poet he is a master, divisively, sometimes awkwardly stretched between two landmass languages. There are times when he appears as a provincial linguistic pedant. At other times he is an overrefined rhymester who thinks it snazzy to pretend that "pre-au-roral" is the best English version of a straightforward Russian word meaning "daybreak." Nabokov seems to know and obstinately use all the English words that ever existed, but does he really not see that "stirless" (as in "Stirless, I stand there at the window...