I'm a sad pedant

John Gribbin says so. In his book about the founding of the Royal Society of London in the 17th century, he acknowledges that the people he is writing about would have regarded themselves as natural philosophers,

But as the old saying goes, if it looks like a duck, flies like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. In modern terminology, the people who are the subjects of this book were scientists, and what they did was science; only the saddest pedant would object to my use of the word science in this context.

J. Gribbin, The Fellowship: The Story of a Revolution, Penguin Books, London, 2006, p. xiii.

Classic title, by the way. Very dramatic.