dryasdust
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English
Etymology
From the fictitious character Jonas Dryasdust, created by Sir Walter Scott, from dry as dust.
Noun
dryasdust (plural dryasdusts)
- A dull, boring or pedantic speaker or writer.
- 1858, Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, , →OCLC, book I, page 23:
- […] how can Dryasdust interpret such things, the dark chaotic dullard, who knows the meaning of nothing cosmic or noble, nor ever will know?
Adjective
dryasdust (not comparable)
- Boring and pedantic in speech or writing.
- 2006, Paula Marantz Cohen, The American Scholar:
- […] Casaubon, the dryasdust scholar in Middlemarch, is said to woo his bride with a “frigid rhetoric . . . as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of an amorous rook.”