Over-precise

The prose is restrained, almost over-precise in its concern to be clear at each moment; […]

Or, as Kingsley Amis put it less delicately in his book The King’s English (1997), the world of grammar is divided into “berks and wankers” – berks being those who are outrageously slipshod about language, and wankers those who are (in our view) abhorrently over-precise.

For instance, the format of the painting in question signals such an aspiration: ‘100.1 × 99.9 cm’, the catalogue states, measurements with which Anton Henning both destroyed the perfection of the square and rejected the round length of one metre. Moreover, these over-precise specifications contrast absurdly with the extravagant manner of painting.