Obstupefacting Excrescences.

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…