Connotation
The term in English is typically used with a negative connotation, indicating someone overly concerned with minutiae and whose tone is perceived as condescending. When it was first used by Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost (1598), it simply meant "teacher". Shortly afterwards it began to be used negatively. Thomas Nashe wrote in Have with you to Saffron-walden (1596), page 43: "O, tis a precious apothegmaticall Pedant, who will finde matter inough to dilate a whole daye of the first inuention of Fy, fa, fum".
Read more about this topic: Pedant
Famous quotes containing the word connotation:
“One of the great triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word “immoral” in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous.... In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or intension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.”
—Clarence Lewis (1883–1964)
“When “reality” is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import; at most the term carries the connotation of an agreeable emotional state.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)