A pedantic critic of minor errors; a nit-picker. We owe this word to Sir Harold Nicolson, who introduced it to the world in the Spectator magazine in August 1952. In an issue of the same magazine later the same year, he described a doryphore as a “questing prig, who derives intense satisfaction from pointing out the errors of others.” A writer in the New Yorker in 1989 described being taken out to lunch one day by the magazine’s editors: “They were rigidly abstemious, lest they fuddle their minds and give hostages to subsequent doryphores on returning to work.” (Your present editor follows a similar regime, with less success.) In 1996, Herb Caen commented in the San Francisco Chronicle: “For a ...