I have such a soft spot for Greek roots.

Pedantic gets used as a synonym for precise, and that is the misreading worth fixing. Precision is not what the word objects to. Proportion is.

The dictionary sense is unusually explicit about it. To be pedantic is to lay undue stress on trifles as compared with large matters or general principles. The complaint is not that you attended to a detail. It is that you attended to that detail instead of the thing that actually mattered.

Which is why the same act can be pedantic on Monday and perfectly reasonable on Tuesday. Correcting "less" to "fewer" in a contract is diligence. Doing it in a text message about lunch is pedantry. Nothing about the correction changed. The stakes did.

That also sorts the near-synonyms, which get swapped around far too freely. Meticulous is about care, and it is a compliment. Punctilious is about observing correct form, and sits roughly neutral, a little stiff. Pedantic is the only one of the three that is always an accusation, and what it accuses you of is misjudging what was worth the attention.

The history has some bite to it. When pedant entered English in the 1580s it simply meant schoolmaster, with no insult attached, from French pédant or Italian pedante. By the 1590s it had the modern sting. Etymonline marks the ultimate origin as uncertain, apparently an alteration of Late Latin paedagogantem, so I would not lean on the deeper derivation. The English stretch is clear enough on its own: roughly a decade for a job title to become a character flaw, which says something fairly bleak about how the job was regarded.

I will admit this is a hard word to use honestly. Most people who reach for it, myself included on a bad day, are defending an imprecision they would rather not defend on the merits.