Dictionary Men
Colin Burrow: Pedantry, 9 July 2026
On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All
by Arnoud S.Q. Visser.
Princeton, 333 pp., £25, November 2025,978 0 691 25756 3 Show More
by Arnoud S.Q. Visser.
Princeton, 333 pp., £25, November 2025,
“... are often represented as pointy-headed geeks who understand nothing about the world as it is? Arnoud Visser thinks so. He gives a learned and extended history of pedantry, which begins with what he terms pedants avant la lettre, the Sophists in fifth-century Athens, and ends with bad films about mad scientists and nutty professors. He argues that the ... ”
