Ultracrepidarian

[pynchonoid]

Weird Words: Ultracrepidarian

Of somebody who gives opinions on matters beyond his
knowledge.

Last Thursday, 10 April, was the 225th anniversary of
the birth of
the essayist William Hazlitt (a date commemorated by
the unveiling
of his restored memorial in St Anne's churchyard,
Soho). To further
mark the date, this week's Weird Word is one he is
first recorded
as using.

He did so in a famous letter of 1819 to William
Gifford, the editor
of the Quarterly Review, a letter which has been
described as "one
of the finest works of invective in the language". In
one of his
more moderate castigations, Hazlitt wrote: "You have
been well
called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic". You may deduce
what Hazlitt
thought of Gifford's journal from this passage in The
Spirit of the
Age (1825):

  His Journal, then, is a depository for every species
of
  political sophistry and personal calumny. There is
no
  abuse or corruption that does not there find a
Jesuitical
  palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we
meet the
  slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant
of
  pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of
power.
  Its object is as mischievous as the means by which
it is
  pursued are odious.

You can see why Hazlitt described himself as "a good
hater".

"Ultracrepidarian" comes from a classical allusion.
The Latin
writer Pliny recorded that Apelles, the famous Greek
painter who
was a contemporary of Alexander the Great, had been
criticised by a
shoemaker, to which Apelles is reported as replying
(no doubt with
expletives deleted) that the shoemaker should not
judge beyond his
soles, in other words, that critics should only
comment on matters
they know something about. In modern English, we might
say "the
cobbler should stick to his last", a proverb that
comes from the
same incident. (A "last" is a shoemaker's pattern,
ultimately from
a Germanic root meaning to follow a track, hence
footstep.)

What Pliny actually wrote was "ne supra crepidam
judicaret", where
"crepidam" is the sole of a shoe, but the idea has
been expressed
in several ways in Latin tags, such as "Ne sutor ultra
crepidam"
("sutor" means "cobbler", a word still known in
Scotland in the
spelling "souter"). The best-known version is the
abbreviated tag
"ultra crepidam", "beyond the sole", from which
Hazlitt formed
"ultracrepidarian".

"Crepidam" derives from Greek "krepis", a shoe; it has
no link with
words like "decrepit" or "crepitation" (which are from
Latin
"crepare", to creak, rattle, or make a noise) or
"crepuscular"
(from the Latin word for twilight), though
"crepidarian" is a very
rare adjective meaning "pertaining to a shoemaker".

[...]

Q. Where does "tempest in a teapot" come from? [Susan
G McManus]

A. I'm not familiar with that American version. If I
wanted to
express the same idea, I'd say it was a "storm in a
teacup", which
is the common British equivalent. Either way, it's a
delightful
phrase for a fuss about nothing very much, or a
dispute of only
minor or local importance.

These two forms are by no means the only ones. The big
Oxford
English Dictionary has examples of "a storm in a cream
bowl" and "
a storm in a wash-hand basin", and suggests that there
were others.
All have this idea of a violent disturbance in a small
compass, by
implication therefore one of little significance. The
alliteration
of "tempest in a teapot" must have helped its
acceptance.

Of the two best-known versions "tempest in a teapot"
seems to be
the older, since I've found an example from a
long-defunct journal
called The United States Democratic Review of January
1838 about
the Supreme Court: "This collegiate tempest in a
teapot might serve
for the lads of the University to moot; but, surely,
was unworthy
the solemn adjudication attempted for it".

[...]

from:
WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 336          Saturday
12 April 2003
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>  


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