Words I've never really known: Didactic. Pleased to finally meet you.

I'm going to start this category as a subset of 'Selected Ravings'.  Blogging tips you off to just how many misappropriations you've been cheerfully trotting out to the sound of tumbleweed impunity, simply because no one else knows what they mean either.  So instead of nodding like you're forty and of course you know what didactic means because you're so comprehensively erudite, or gently weeping for the future of prose in private, let's stop being too fucking lazy to look them up and start with one that's been biting my nuts for a while.  Je ne sais pas it well enough to throw it squarely at some other pretentious arsehat in an argument.  For shame.

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Didactic (adjective).

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I've always been attracted to its crispy patrician sound and authoritative shape without ever knowing exactly what it meant because let's face it- the only people who use it in conversation are the ones you stopped listening to ten minutes ago.  I did suppose it was associated with manner or rhetoric, so I was close.
According to my Apple dictionary it means 'intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive; in the manner of a teacher, particularly so as to treat someone in a patronizing way.' 
Synonyms include instructive, instructional, educative, preceptive (0_0), pedagogic (hot), moralistic.
Remarks.  If Didactic was a person.  They'd be intriguing from a distance of say... half a hallway, but they'd turn out to have really exuberant ear hair or smell like cabbage or Thai fish sauce close-up and would probably wear birth-control Birkenstocks that started off black but now look brown.

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