pedantry

This term carries a strong negative connotation, describing a narrow-minded obsession with formal rules that obscures the actual meaning or purpose of a subject. It suggests a lack of intellectual flexibility, where the speaker prioritizes the correction of a minor error over the progression of a meaningful conversation.

Because it describes an abstract quality or a behavioral trait, the word is treated as an uncountable mass noun. It cannot be pluralized to describe multiple instances of the behavior; instead, one must use a partitive construction such as a display of pedantry or an instance of pedantry to quantify it.