Phil O'Logue, or (if you prefer) "P" words

Today's springboard word comes from the pages of the Sunday Comics. While comics are not normally a source of words with two syllables let alone a source for this blog, nonetheless there it was - in a funny comic called Frazz, by Jeff Mallett. The comic uses the old (as in 1964-vintage Top-10 song) joke about what you call an ant that gets stepped on, and updates it to refer to the response of the teacher, who is characterized as a pedant. It was a nice turn of joke.

So what, exactly, is a pedant? A friend of mine from the 80s (we're catching up to this century) first used the phrase, saying to me "Larry, only a pedant knows what a pedant is." I felt a bit ashamed that I didn't know, until I read the definition: "someone who puts unnecessary stress on trivial points of learning, displaying a scholarship lacking in sense of proportion." I've grown so much since that jab, and now can display scholarship in such greater lack of proportion to what I could then! Live and learn, I say.

Anyway, pedant comes as a direct transliteration from the French word for schoolmaster, and still maintains a strong tie to teaching. (It can also mean a teacher who holds arbitrarily to exact adherence to a narrow set of rules. English, anyone?) It comes originally from the Greek, from the same root word from which we get pedagogy, the pedantic word for teaching.

In contradistinction (a word I actually used last week; I started to use it, stopped and tried to think of a better word but couldn't, so went ahead with it) to pedant, which has a smallness about it, polymath has no negative connotation by definitiion. It sometimes can be used in a negative way, but normally someone would use pedant if they wanted to express a negative comment about someone's learning and show of it, and pedant is more familiar than polymath. (At least I hear it more...)

Polymath comes pretty directly from the Greek polymathes (no relation to Johnny Mathis) which means simply "knowing much". In my reading this week I ran across the word in reference to Ernest van den Haag. The writer may have been a pedant or trying to qualify as a polymath himself, but he used it as a compliment.

The third word is slightly off-subject, but consider it an extra, like a mint at the end of the meal. Before deciding to blog I thought maybe I would write these as an article in newpaper or magazine, under the nom de plume (we'll get to this word) Phil O'Logue. The word philology comes from two Greek words: philien, meaning to love, and logos, meaning a word. It is a lovely word for a love of words and learning. Eventually a philologist might be known as a polymath, that is if the person doesn't become too demonstrative or narrow about it and become a pedant.