pedantry

Noun

pedantry (countable and uncountable, plural pedantries)

1. An excessive attention to detail or rules.
   • They had heard people call things pedantic, which they did not think were so ; for instance, a boy had once said that Harry himself was a pedant, for talking of the siege of Syracuse, and of the machines used there, because the boy knew nothing about them, and disliked reading. "Then you perceive,"...1825, "Works" by Maria Edgeworth page 150
   • Another point on which Smart insists is the distinction between serf and surf […] A distinction can of course be made, and without much difficulty, by those who think of it, and is made by those who have formed a habit of doing so; but the distinction is so rarely made as to amount almost to...1869, Alexander John Ellis, “III. On the Pronunciation of English in the Sixteenth Century, and its Gradual Change during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, in On Early English Pronunciation...
   1. An instance of such behaviour.
      • I don’t want to listen to your pedantries anymore.
      • [T]he southern court of the ballium had become a flower-garden, with quaint terraces, statues, knots of flowers, clipped yews and hollies, and all the pedantries of the topiarian art.1855, Charles Kingsley, “The True and Tragical History of Mr. John Oxenham of Plymouth”, in Westward Ho!: Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, […], volume I, Cambridge...
2. An overly ambitious display of learning.