pedantic

pedantic, academic, scholastic, bookish are comparable as terms of derogation applied to thinkers, scholars, and learned men and their utterances.

Pedantic often implies ostentatious display of knowledge, didacticism, and stodg- iness

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his opinions were as pedantic as his life was abstemious— Froude

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It may also connote undue attention to scholarly minutiae and small interest in significant issues

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much pedantic mistaking of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate experience— Huxle

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Academic rarely carries implications of disagreeable personal characteristics but it does stress abstractness, lack of practical experience and interests, and often the inability to consider a situation realistically

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there is so much bad writing . . . because writing has been dominated by . . . the academic teachers and critics— Ellis

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Scholastic is less fixed in its implications than the others, for sometimes the allusion is to philosophic Scholasticism and sometimes to modern education. As a rule it implies dryness, formalism, adherence to the letter, and sometimes subtlety

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it is very able, but harsh and crabbed and intolerably scholastic— Laski

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Bookish often suggests learning derived from books rather than from actualities

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the Greeks had a name for such mixture of learning and folly, which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages— Adler

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the gestures of Mr. Lutyens's heroes are a trifle bookish, too seldom of the dusty streets— Times Lit. Sup.

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and sometimes it implies a decided literary or rhetorical quality

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bookish words

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bookish interests

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Analogous words: *learned, erudite: *recondite, abstruse