A 1582 comedy translates "pedant" as "worthless idiot, donkey head"
by Popkin from Boing Boing on (#77PE7)

Pompous scholars were a standard joke on the Italian stage through the 16th century. Arnoud Visser writes in The Public Domain Review that Francesco Belo, a playwright from Rome, published the first play to put one at the center. In El pedante, from the 1520s, the schoolmaster Prudenzio "talks in a mangled mix of Latin and vernacular." - Read the rest
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