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"Give a man a hammer, and everything he sees will be a nail," is an astute observation of human behavior. What is the name for someone with slight power, for example, the power to vote to close a question on this site, who exercises that power obsessively and gleefully?

Zan700
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    "Give a man a hammer, and everything he sees will be a nail" means that the man will only consider solving problems one way. That is different from exercising power. – CJ Dennis Jan 30 '20 at 04:10
  • "Credit for this quotation has been given to everyone from Buddha to Bernard Baruch. Mark Twain is the most common recipient, based on no evidence

    A thematic precursor involving a boy was published in a London periodical called “Once a Week” in 1868. The notion of a child wielding a hammer with overeager energy also occurred in later citations: 2

    Give a boy a hammer and chisel; show him how to use them; at once he begins to hack the doorposts, to take off the corners of shutter and window frames...." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/08/hammer-nail/

     – Zan700 Jan 30 '20 at 05:20

3 Answers3

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power happy

Example:

Watch out, @abc has almost reached 50K rep. I can just see it now, he's going to be power happy, running about closing everything he can get his hands on.

(Not based on any real person I've ever seen here.)

aparente001
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  • Is there a word for comeone who gives an identical answer at a duplicate instead of CVing? – Edwin Ashworth Feb 03 '20 at 19:18
  • @EdwinAshworth - Absent-minded? Behind the times? I don't think I had seen any close votes -- or maybe they were there and I was unobservant. I commented "power happy* and someone asked me to make it an answer. I was probably distracted. – aparente001 Feb 06 '20 at 23:40
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In British English we have the noun jobsworth which the Collins online dictionary defines as

a person in a position of minor authority who invokes the letter of the law in order to avoid any action requiring initiative, cooperation, etc

The word derives from the sentence "That's more than my job's worth" which is popularly supposed to be petty officials' response to non-standard requests. The definition does not quite match the request but in practice someone being deliberately obstructive or pedantically officious is often referred to as "a jobsworth"

BoldBen
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A bully. They typically have lack social awareness, have low self-esteem and compensate by trying to exert control over others. On certain forums they'll set themselves up as experts, denigrate the input of other users and seek to shut down conversations that challenge their position. They can often be recognised by Answer/Question ratios of several hundreds, if not thousands, to one.

Kevin Ryan
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