pedantry

Such pedantry is perhaps why Malaysian durians have earned a special place on the Chinese table.

From BBC ● Jan. 10, 2026

Here’s my favorite recent example of this sort of unhelpful pedantry:

From Slate ● Nov. 4, 2024

A windowless chamber is for dwelling on the consequences of your pedantry.

From New York Times ● Oct. 7, 2021

Well, actually it’s just the North American division, and it also includes punctuation pedantry.

From Washington Post ● Nov. 25, 2020

Winston Churchill did not, as legend has it, reply to an editor who had corrected his prose with “This is pedantry up with which I will not put.”

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

He was an observational genius whose main talent was for exposure — exposure of the predictable opponent and exposure of pedantries, and he treated both as pretty much the same thing.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 13, 2022

There is a withering crossfire of pedantries in nearly all academic discussions of slavery and American blacks.

From Time Magazine Archive

How far away from such conceptions of Christianity are those which busy themselves on either side with matters of detail, with punctilios of observance, and pedantries of form?

From The Expositor's Bible: Colossians and Philemon by Alexander Maclaren

There is no concession to such pedantries as Professor Robertson Smith's "greaves of the warrior that stampeth in the fray," or such barbarisms as Professor Cheynes' "boot of him that trampleth noisily."

From Matthew Arnold by George William Erskine Russell

Bid the professor quit His fraudulent pedantries, and do i' the world The thing he would teach others.

From The Admirable Bashville or, Constancy Unrewarded by Bernard Shaw