pedantical

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare has Berowne complain, “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical; these summer flies / Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.”

That makes plain not only that formal rhetoric’s “three-piled hyperboles” and “figures pedantical” were familiar to Shakespeare, but that he could have anticipated them being familiar enough to his audience to elicit a groan of recognition.

On the fourth floor of a renovated factory off Union Square in lower Manhattan, early on a sweltering August day, romantical cats and pedantical cats, allegorical cats and metaphorical cats are assembling.

There appears to be something pedantical in criticising a popular proverb—something vexatious in calling in question the sort of ancestral wisdom it is supposed to contain—in disputing a truth, which has been formalised and accepted by the general assent and perpetual iteration, at all hours of the day, by all sorts of talkers.

Out of his school he is no way pedantical in carriage or discourse; contenting himself to be rich in Latin, though he doth not gingle with it in every company wherein he comes.