Laudator Temporis Acti

Basil L. Gildersleeve, "Grammar and Aesthetics," Princeton Review 59 (1883) 290-310 (at 310), rpt. in his Essays and Studies, Educational and Literary (Baltimore: N. Murray, 1890), pp. 127-157 (at pp. 156-157, footnote omitted):

It is true that there is more exciting reading than a table of decimals, but those decimals have after all a meaning; and if a lodgment has been gained for the thought that all the minute grammatical research of the present day may be made available, and is to be made available, for literary criticism, for aesthetic appreciation, something has been done in vindication of the much-abused fellowship of grammarians—the 'corner-hummers', as the Greek epigrammatist contemptuously calls them.

Basil L. Gildersleeve, Hellas and Hesperia (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), pp. 15-16:

To be sure, in Browning's Grammarian's Funeral, the poet has done something to redeem the craft, and I welcome the vindication; for whilst Browning and his commentators do not fail to tell us that the technical grammarian of the present day was not meant so much as the grammarian of the Renascence—the student of antique literature—still the man who "properly based oun, dead from the waist down," belongs to our guild. He belongs to the "corner-hummers" and "monosyllablers" of the old epigram.

The Greek epigrammatist is Herodicus of Babylon, and the epigram is preserved by Athenaeus 5.222 a (tr. S. Douglas Olson):

Flee, students of Aristarchus, over the wide back of the sea
from Greece, you who are more cowardly than the brown deer,
buzzers-in-corners, masters of the monosyllable, concerned with
sphin versus sphōin and min versus nin.
This is what I wish for, storm-tossed ones. But may Greece
and Babylon, child of the gods, always be there for Herodicus.

Here is another translation of Herodicus' epigram by T.R. Glover, from The Challenge of the Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 190:

Pupils of Aristarchus! flee
Over the broad back of the sea!
More timid than the tawny doe,
Out with you all, from Hellas go!
Buzzers in corners, all whose mind
To monosyllables is confined—
  σφῶϊν and σφίν
  And μίν and νίν;
  Go, all together,
  And meet bad weather!
But for Herodicus, may Greece
And God's own Babylon dwell in peace.

Here is the Greek:

φεύγετ', Ἀριστάρχειοι, ἐπ' εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης
  Ἑλλάδα, τῆς ξουθῆς δειλότεροι κεμάδος,
γωνιοβόμβυκες μονοσύλλαβοι, οἷσι μέμηλε
  τὸ σφίν καὶ <τὸ> σφῶιν καὶ τὸ μίν ἠδὲ τὸ νίν.
τοῦθ' ὑμῖν εἴη, δυσπέμφελοι, Ἡροδίκωι δὲ
  Ἑλλὰς ἀεὶ μίμνοι καὶ θεόπαις Βαβυλών.

Text and commentary are in D.L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 62-65. On γωνιοβόμβυκες Page comments as follows (p. 64):

on γωνιο- see Dodds on Plato Gorg. 485D 7...and numerous later examples in Jacobs on his Append. epigr. no. 34. It is a 'proverbial taunt', as Dodds says, but not, as he adds 'at the academic life'; whatever the walk of life, it is applied to the contrast between the superior persons who take the centre of the floor and the inferior who congregate in the corners.

The second half of the compound is less clear. LSJ render -βόμβυκες 'buzzing', as if it were related to βομβέω, from which it is in fact altogether distinct. βόμβυξ is either a silkworm, which seems out of place here, or a wind-instrument, which is more promising....The meaning in Herodicus should then be that the pedants congregate in corners and make a great deal of noise there.

We can see the Greek roots of the compound γωνιοβόμβυξ (gōniobómbyx) in English words. Pentagon (five-cornered), polygon (many-cornered), etc., show the Greek root for corner. If -bómbyx comes from βόμβυξ, perhaps English bombast is related; if from βομβέω, English bomb, bombard, and bombinate are related.

Other references to corner-hummers by Gildersleeve include:

• "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 13 (1891) 383-385 (at 383): "[W]hat is to become of the feeble folk who make their houses in the rocks of the Greek text, what is to become of the minute scholars, the syntacticians, the statisticians and the whole tribe of γωνιοβόμβυκες?"
  
• Letter to Benjamin Ide Wheeler (March 14, 1891, discussing the fitness of Alfred Emerson for a post at Cornell University): "His language is full of odd twists and hidden humors and his ways of presentation will, I fear, be always more or less exotic but the soul of the matter is in him and though while he was associated with me he never showed any sympathy with what he was perfectly capable of calling my grammatical 'goniobombycinism,' he has a good knowledge of Greek..."
  
• "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 38 (1917) 333-342 (at 338): "But one remembers that Our Lord is addressing a generation of vipers and not a swarm of harmless γωνιοβόμβυκες."