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In psychiatry, stilted speech or pedantic speech [1] is communication characterized by situationally inappropriate formality. [2] This formality can be expressed both through abnormal prosody [3] as well as speech content that is "inappropriately pompous, legalistic, philosophical, or quaint". [4] Often, such speech can act as evidence for ...
Anal retentiveness is a personality trait that is characterised by excessive concern with trivial details. [1] The concept originated in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, where one aspect of the anal stage of psychosexual development is pleasure in the retention of faeces. Fixation in this stage can potentially result in a personality marked by ...
Pedantry. Pedantry ( / ˈpɛd.ən.tri / PED-en-try) is an excessive concern with formalism, minor details, and rules that are not important. [1] [2] Fowler's Concise Dictionary of Modern English (1926) recognised that the term pedantry was "relative" and subjective, stating "my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her ...
Hoist with his own petard. " Hoist with his own petard " is a phrase from a speech in William Shakespeare 's play Hamlet that has become proverbial. The phrase's meaning is that a bomb-maker is blown ("hoist", the past tense of "hoise") off the ground by his own bomb ("petard"), and indicates an ironic reversal or poetic justice. [1]
Eidetic memory ( / aɪˈdɛtɪk / eye-DET-ik ), also known as photographic memory and total recall, is the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once [1] and without using a mnemonic device. [2]
An inkhorn is an inkwell made of horn. It was an important item for many scholars, which soon became symbolic of writers in general. Later, it became a byword for fussy or pedantic writers. The phrase "inkhorn term" is found as early as 1553. [1] And ere that we will suffer such a prince, So kind a father of the commonweal,
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v. t. e. Linguistic prescription, also called prescriptivism or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. [1] [2] These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, [3] such normative ...