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

Even now, lawmakers take this responsibility with a seriousness sometimes bordering on pedantry.

From New York Times ● Jan. 17, 2024

I’m deeply dismayed that the perennial paragon of pedantry, George F. Will, failed at either simple arithmetic or calendar history.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 9, 2022

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

These are not the most besetting dangers of more modern steersmen: what we have to guard against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries of Steevens nor a recrudescence of the moralities of Ulrici. 

From A Study of Shakespeare by Edmund Gosse

It was the real speech of the evening, which was all along waiting to be delivered instead of the frigid pedantries on the paper.

From The Half-Hearted by John Buchan

We can readily pardon his petty pedantries and the little vices of expression he persisted in.

From Americanisms and Briticisms with other essays on other isms by Brander Matthews