I don’t normally make separate posts for different reviews of the same book, but Colin Burrow’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry has so little in common with Clare Bucknell’s for the NYRB (LH), and it’s so frabjously expressive in and of itself, that I can’t resist presenting it on its own. It starts:
This is what ‘Listen up’ sounds like when translated into pedantese: ‘Why, you brute nebulons, have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot yet tell how to edify an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities.’ So speaks one of the earliest representations of the pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. This was an entertainment put on for Elizabeth I in 1578, in which courtiers were invited to laugh at schoolteachers and the queen was encouraged to choose between different styles of rustic suitor for the Lady of May.
Sidney’s playlet was eventually published two decades later, in the same year as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. That made 1598 the year of the pedant. Shakespeare’s play included a walk-on part for the schoolmaster and turbo-pedant Holofernes. He is right down in Sidney’s groove, so get your plumbeous cerebrosities (leaden brains) in gear or you won’t understand a word of what he says about his rival, the braggart Armado:
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak ‘dout’ sine ‘b’ when he should say ‘doubt’, ‘det’ when he should pronounce ‘debt’: d, e, b, t, not d, e, t.
Holofernes’s first sentence here means that Armado talks bullshit, or takes a small hank of raw wool and spins it out into a thread so fine that it loses all substance. There was a strong association in Shakespeare’s period between rough woven native woollen cloth and honest speech, or what Berowne in the same play calls ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. Nasty overspun silks, expensive imports and foreigners like Armado (whose very name reminds you that the beastly Spanish are always ready to send another Armada) are all threats to the solid English of douBts and deBts and honest truths.
The period between 1590 and 1600 was the most extraordinary decade in English literary history. At its start came Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the publication of Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. At its end, or maybe just after, was Hamlet. It was also the decade in which the word ‘pedant’ first appeared in print in English. There is a deep connection between these apparently unrelated phenomena. The figure of the pedant as a literary character emerged in Italian drama of the 1540s, both in the commedia erudita (which was written down and based on Roman comedy) and in its improv version, the commedia dell’arte. Sidney was doing some Italianate showing off by allowing Rombus in The Lady of May to spin out the thread of his verbosities. He was saying ‘Your Majesty, we English (or at least Sir Philip Sidney) can out-Italian the Italians.’ Shakespeare was doing something similar. There’s a flavour of ‘anything Sidney does I can do better’ about Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its fancy French courtiers and high-flown language. The aspiration to be European was one driver of the literary revolution of the 1590s.
Another was the desire to grow a language which could conquer and absorb foreign terms and styles, while staying recognisably English. That was an inherently unstable duo of ambitions, and the pedant sat squarely on the faultline between them. The polysyllabic shower of Latinate globulosity that eructates from the gobs of early modern pedants shows not only that their authors and creators could be European but also that they have a mocking grasp on all the words, even the words you can’t understand, and that the author is just a little bit uneasy about his own powers of linguistic innovation. Does my love of polysyllabic foreign-sounding words (which were in this period called ‘inkhorn’ terms because they came from people who spent too long scribbling) make me un-English, or even absurd? George Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie (1589) was keen to police rhetorical excess in the interests of spare London courtly English, inveighed against the use of ‘words of exceeding great length, which have been fetched from the Latin inkhorn or borrowed of strangers, the use of them in rhyme is nothing pleasant, saving perchance to the common people, who rejoice much to be at plays and interludes’. Creating a pedant was a rhetorically nationalistic act of a curiously double kind. It said: ‘I can entertain you with all the big words; but being solid and English I can also laugh at these obstupefacting excrescences.’
Click through for more; needless to say, Martinus Scriblerus and Edward Casaubon make their ineluctable appearances. Oh, well, I can’t resist adding this passage:
There are some juicy details along the way: the pedagogue (and pedagogues have often been portrayed as pedants) Cassian of Imola was supposedly murdered in 363 ad by his pupils, who stabbed him with their writing implements. That might make him the patron saint of pedants, though Vilgard of Ravenna has a claim to that title too: he had a dream in which demons disguised as Virgil, Horace and Juvenal told him that every word they wrote was true, and he was condemned to death for heresy in 970. By 1678 Ulrik Huber had produced the first full-length Latin treatise on pedantry, which he defined as ‘learning that is corrupted by arrogance, feigned virtue and impertinent judgment’. In the elegant salons of late 17th-century France, the pedant ‘became a model of excessively masculine boorishness’. In the battle of the Ancients and Moderns (between those who thought antiquity was the best source of knowledge and those who trusted modernity to produce new ideas), both camps ‘used the label of pedantry to discredit each other’s approach’.
Cassian of Imola or Vilgard of Ravenna — a difficult choice!
Ignatius J. Reilly, anonymously, to his professor:
Only loosely related: I think St. Epiphanius of Salamis (+403) would be a good current patron saint for Stupid Internet Controversies, on account of that situation where, being merely human, he uncritically accepted and reposted negative memes about St. John Chrysostom before, being saintly, he began to suspect that he was being used and that Chryostom’s views might in fact be more nuanced than the negative memes conceded. Whereupon he bailed out of the viral online anti-Chrysostom campaign and had no direct involvement in the so-called Synod of the Oak that attempted to depose him.
He chews more than he bites off.
By coincidence (or Is It?) I just came upon a further review of the same work, which says that it’s “primarily a book about pedant-on-pedant rhetorical violence: Most of the accusations of pedantry it surveys are reciprocal, and surface in moments of particularly tight competition for social advancement or limited economic resources. In the sixteenth century, for example, humanists and scholastics accused each other of wasting time on pointless trivia, while humanists developed a courtly patronage system to rival traditional scholastic institutions like the monastery or university. In the seventeenth century, downwardly mobile courtiers and upwardly mobile men of letters mocked each other’s affectations in a scramble for royal favor.”
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/humanism-in-a-posthumanist-age/articles/getting-to-know-the-know-it-alls
St. Epiphanius of Salamis
A protoiconoclast, it appears. He would also have been opposed to NFTs.
363 ad
Not to be a nitpicky persnickety peever, but “ad” is the worst possible option, IMO.
As a Christian myself, I actually rather like CE/BCE (especially as there is no reason to think that Little* Dennis actually got his calculations right in this respect, and several reasons to doubt it. Calling it the** “Christian Era” neatly sidesteps this awkward question.)
* The Latin exiguus is, implausibly but nevertheless truly, the origin of Welsh eisiau “want”, nowadays pronounced /ɪʃɔ/ and used as a sort of honorary verb.
** Though, of course, “a Christian Era” would be more accurate. “Common Era” seems rather to beg the question … common to whom?
Naming years after the consuls* in office is the best way, of course, though the method has run into some technical difficulties lately.**
* Ordinarii, not suffecti, obviously. That would be silly.
** Lists of consular fasti are readily available online, and of course there are apps for this. Objections on the grounds of alleged complexity are thus plainly ill-founded, and one can only wonder at the true motives of those who adduce this as a significant difficulty. One suspects Guelph influence.
I though he was Dennis the Chatterbox. And yeah, as best I can figure he finessed year 1 so the leap years would be divisible by 4. (As they were when counting AUC, I think, except for the regrettable episode when they’d done leap years every 3rd year as we count it, and Augustus had to tell them to skip a few and do it right after that).
Denis the Exigent
Probably it’s in small caps in the original, and the formatting didn’t come across.
Springer Nature does that.
Almost certainly. I frequently have to restore small caps when I copy-and-paste text. (I use the Small caps letters generator.)
OK, I’m relieved. In earlier times I was annoyed when “Green’s function” made it all the way to “green function”.
Maybe the best thing in Infinite Jest was naming years after their commercial sponsors.
Also, I’ll try to steal obstupefacting, though I wonder if I’ll have opportunities to use it more often than once per decade or so. What a glorious word!
@Jerry Friedman: I refuse to use “green function.” They will always be “Green’s functions” to me.
Why “Riemann integral” and “Lie group” and (a fave) “Poynting vector” but not “Green function”? Is it just because of the name/color ambiguity?
That’s probably part of it, but these things are mysterious. Why “Dall Sheep” but “Dall’s Porpoise”? Both are named for William H. Dall (1845–1927).
@Brett: Good man!
Google Scholar shows plenty of articles with “Green function”, but not “green function” except in some titles erroneously lowercased by indexers but with capital in the source text.
In the introduction to the last edition of Classical Electrodynamics, Jackson says that he resisted using “Green function” for a long time but eventually gave in, convinced the analogy to, for example, “Bessel function.” I don’t think that’s a great analogy, since a Bessel function or a Whittaker function is a member of a defined set of special functions, whereas a Green’s function is a function with certain properties that depend on the problem under consideration. You can ask, “Is this a Bessel function?” and that has a definite yes-or-no answer. “Is this a Green’s function?” on its own is a meaningless question. Moreover, Jackson and virtually everyone else still refers to “Green’s theorem,” “Green’s first identity,” etc., because, as Jackson puts it, “that is whose theorem it is.”
Hm, I can’t find “green function” in this sense at Google Books, but I know I’ve seen it. For some reason I’m remembering the name “Park” (not “Parks”) in connection with superconductivity, but that doesn’t help.
I have some memory of surnames used as predicate adjectives in math, like “Every [thing] is [name]”, but I can’t think of a specific example.
Sylow is one, I seem to remember. p-Sylow groups…
A lctvs is Hausdorff if the defining seminorms satisfy a simply stated constraint (basically they separate points).
It’s funny that only some names used for mathematical properties that way work. *Every Hilbert space is Banach, is (trivially) true but ill formed.
Yeah, Hausdorff topological spaces (and topologies). A very useful adjective. (If you really want to know, it’s the same as a T₂ space: For any two points you can find disjoint open sets that separate them. Which is true for most useful topological spaces).
Is it too much to hope for that (at least in loose or poetic language) one LCTVS could be Hausdorffer than another one? Or will that just enrage the topology-world equivalent of the pedants who claim that “more unique” isn’t a thing?
ETA: to answer my own question, the notion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_Hausdorff_space does suggest to me that Hausdorffness is a quality admitting of different degrees, but maybe I’m missing something.
There are a whole bunch of separation axioms stronger that Hausdorff, but the terminology is not consistent. Pretty much everyone agrees what T₀, T₁, T₂, T₃, and T₄ mean, but there is a separate set of terms that may or may not mean the same thing. T₃ and T₄ may mean the same as regular and normal, or the latter may not include the requirement that one-point sets be closed (which is T₁); in that case, T₃ and T₄ mean the same as regular Hausdorff and normal Hausdorff. There are also other terms (often involving other mathematicians’ names) and other Tᵢ, but there is not universal agreement about what most of them mean. Each Tᵢ property implies all Tⱼ properties with j < i. Metric spaces obey all possible separation axioms, and they are occasionally denoted T ͚ .
Completely Hausdorff means that any two points can be separated not merely by open sets, but by a continuous function; sometimes this is called T₂ ₁⸝₂, but other topologists use T₂ ₁⸝₂ for a slightly weaker axiom that also lies between T₂ and T₃. There is also T₃ ₁⸝₂ (sometimes more cutely written with π as the subscript), which is also completely regular [Hausdorff]; it bears the same relation to regular [Hausdorff] that completely Hausdorff has to Hausdorff. (This property is also known as Tychonoff, and it’s the strongest separation axiom that is completely well behaved under taking subsets and products. The real numbers R are a metric space, but a product of an uncountable number of copies of R does not satisfy any of the separation properties stronger than T₃ ₁⸝₂.)
With completely normal [Hausdorff], which is also T₅, the “completely” terminology means something different. This is because Urysohn’s Lemma (called a Lemma because Urysohn proved it on way to proving the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, but the lemma itself is actually one of the most important theorems in general topology) shows that every normal space satisfies the criterion that closed sets can be separated by continuous functions. There’s also T₆, and there have been proposals for at least T₇ and, I think, T₈ as well, but there has been little uptake on those higher properties among mathematicians.
Well, it sounds like something that’s T₃ is Xer than something that’s merely T₂, for some adjective X. And if X isn’t “Hausdorff,” why not?
Completely Hausdorff sounds like the name of a sitcom. “Next week Harry Hausdorff gets into another wacky situation!”
@J.W. Brewer: Hausdorff included T₂ among his axioms for topology. The first three axioms are slightly more awkward than their modern versions, but they are basic properties of topological spaces. However, it was realized that there were interesting situations in which his fourth axiom (T₂) did not apply. Nowadays, the interesting question about a space is whether it obeys that fourth Hausdorff axiom, so that was the property that got his name attached.
Weaker generalizations were later identified, and are sometimes called by other mathematicians’ names. Wikipedia identifies T₁ with Frechet, but I’ve never seen that, and a Frechet space is usually something much more complicated. T₀ spaces are sometimes called Kolmogorov, since he worked on that as the weakest topological separation axiom. We can define topological spaces that are not T₀, but properties that depend on the lack of T₀ separation are not really topological properties. They are just properties of the underlying sets and involve discontinuous functions (only continuous functions really being meaningful in topology).
As to what scalar adjective should be used for characterize which Tᵢ a space satisfies, no one seems to have come up with one. Separable would work, were it not used for a completely different topological property, having a countable dense subset. (A subset X is dense in Y if every open set of Y, except the empty set, contains a point of X.) Separated might have worked also, but it is also already in use too; for example, another statement of the normal property is that any two disjoint closed sets may be separated by open sets. A lot of terminology in topology is unsystematic or overloaded. (See here for some earlier examples.)
Completely Hausdorff sounds like the name of a sitcom. “Next week Harry Hausdorff gets into another wacky situation!”
He always manages to separate any two of his bickering housemates.
The nice thing about the treatment of separation properties in Counterexamples in Topology was that by the end of the chapter I was so hopelessly befuddled that I could start over. Rinse and repeat, and then the summer vacation was over with no boredom.