Saturday, February 18, 2017

word request - An appropriate term for an overly by-the-rules person


In Swedish, we've got a term that loosely translates as paragraph jockey. It refers to a person, often a clerk or a referee, who is following all the rules, prescriptions and agreements ad absurdum. The application is slightly derogatory but not vulgar.


In many cases, the term is used when a referee or a bureaucrat makes a call and, while being correct rule-wise, they miss the point of the system that the said rule is made to support.


The result of such call or decision may vary from non-essential, insignificant changes up to a totally weird and unintended destruction of the greater good.


Is there a term like that in English? My google-fu gave me Jack-in-office but when I wrote that to a friend, they didn't get the point at all.




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