pretentious, pernickety, obtuse, pompous, prolix, didactic, humorless, tiresome, longwinded, ponderous, wordy, rebarbative, sententious, priggish, condescending, schoolmasterly, verbose, glib, unpoetic, reductive, tedious, legalistic, melodramatic, preachy, boring, florid, trite, turgid, abstruse, erudite, overdetermined, dull, censorious, overfamiliar, overwrought, polemical, talky, tendentious, shavian, prissy, officious, mawkish, sneery, puerile, droll, aphoristic, fastidious, flippant, digressive, sophistic, tricksy, silly, banal, philistine, fatuous, punctilious, lunkheaded, waspish, maudlin, dogmatic, wearisome, jejune, cynical, discursive, unentertaining, ungifted, orotund, sarcastic, schoolboyish, unenlightening, moralistic, expository, sanctimonious, hyperbolic, formulaic, nitpicky, sniffy, highfalutin, curmudgeonly, passionless, nabokovian, sesquipedalian, effete, amusing, recondite, dotty, hackneyed, jesuitical, empiricist, twee, eggheaded, crass, daft, tautological, cloying, dispassionate, judgmental, supercilious, gnomic, captious, otiose, slapdash, bookish, businesslike, jocular, stilted, unimaginative, boastful, circumspect, fact, finical, formalistic, forthright, prosaic, unemotional, exacting, irreverent

captiously, flagellum, pedantically, scourge

academic, donnish, scholarly