dryasdust


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dry·as·dust

or dry-as-dust  (drī′əz-dŭst′)
n.
A dull, pedantic speaker or writer.

[After Dr. Jonas Dryasdust, a fictitious character to whom Sir Walter Scott dedicated some of his novels.]

dry′as·dust′ adj.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Mentioned in ?
References in classic literature ?
On the contrary, I fear I shall incur the censure of presumption in placing the venerable name of Dr Jonas Dryasdust at the head of a publication, which the more grave antiquary will perhaps class with the idle novels and romances of the day.
My respectful compliments attend Miss Dryasdust; I endeavoured to match the spectacles agreeable to her commission, during my late journey to London, and hope she has received them safe, and found them satisfactory.
Dominic "Grief ", as he pehaps should be called, has been moaning interminably about Brexit for months, in as dryasdust a legalistic manner as it is possible to be.
Dryasdust, and spend years in exploring the rubbish-heaps accumulated by former specimens of the genus" (Stephen, "Some Early Impressions" 567).
Dryasdust reports to the Author of Waverley at the end of Regauntlet on his researches about what happened thereafter.
You read it, you analyze it, you catalogue it, you do with it as Doctor Dryasdust by T.
Dryasdust. But the secondary position of "The Epic," as I will argue, is not merely a matter of Tennyson's editorial twitch.
In the same way [as Darwin studying earthworms] Dryasdust, by preserving records, mainly because they were antiquated, has provided materials from which the modern historian undertakes to reconstruct a picture of the past, and to lay the foundations of social science." (7he Atlantic Monthly, December 1903, 750).
Dryasdust, someone about whom a biographer has felt duty-bound rather than determined to write.
"Dryasdust Antiquarianism and Soppy Masculinity: The Waverly Novels and the Gender of History." Representations 82.1 (2003): 52-86.
Although Froude was a prodigious worker in original archives, much more so than Freeman in fact, he was no Carlylian Dryasdust. Indeed, that was his greatest offence: Froude wrote too well, far too well for a professional scientist, whose work should be inaccessible to the general public.