dryasdust

English

Etymology

From the fictitious character Jonas Dryasdust, created by Sir Walter Scott, from dry as dust.

Noun

dryasdust (plural dryasdusts)

  1. A dull, boring or pedantic speaker or writer.
    • 2006: Paula Marantz Cohen in 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.”
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