Ultracrepidarian
One of the many problems with social media is that it gives people a platform to spout forth on matters that they know nothing or very little about. Some might argue that this is the perfect qualification to be a modern-day politician. I get increasingly tired of bumping into these people when I trawl through those sites I grace with my attention. Now that the character limit has been doubled on Twitter, I am almost tempted to respond to them by calling them ultracrepidarian. Adjectivally, the word means expressing opinions outside of the scope of their knowledge or expertise and, naturally, as a noun it means someone who does this.
In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder tells the story of the painter, Apelles. Once he had completed a painting, Apelles would put it on public display and listen to the comments that the onlookers made. On one occasion a shoemaker found fault with Apelles’ representation of a sandal, there being, in his opinion, one loop less than there should have been. His critic then went further, criticising the representation of the subject’s leg. Apelles saw red and, according to Pliny, cried out, “ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret”, which can be translated as a cobbler shouldn’t judge beyond his shoe.
A variant of Pliny’s phrase was “ne sutor ultra crepidam”, abbreviated down to ultra crepidam, ultra meaning beyond and crepida, crepidam being its accusative form, a sandal, consisting principally of a sole with straps. It was from this formulation that the term ultracrepidarian was developed and credit for that, if credit is due, goes to the essayist, William Hazlitt.
The object of Hazlitt’s wrath was William Gifford who edited The Quarterly Review from 1809 until 1825, a literary and political review which lasted until 1967. One of its early contributors was Sir Walter Scott. Hazlitt wrote for its rival publication, The Edinburgh Review. Trouble brewed in 1819 when The Quarterly Review published a review of Hazlitt’s published lectures in which he was condemned as ignorant and his writing as unintelligible. In response, Hazlitt published a pamphlet entitled A Letter to William Gifford Esq.
In what has been called “one of the finest works of invective in the language” and what was an apologia for his life and work, Hazlitt let rip. “Like a conceited mechanic in a village ale-house, you would set down every one who differs from you as an ignorant blockhead; and very fairly infer that any one who is beneath yourself must be nothing. You have been well called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic”. The coining of the word was a mot juste, his readers almost certainly realising that Gifford, of lowly birth, had once been apprenticed to a shoemaker. There was a certain class to invective in those days.
The attack shook Hazlitt and from thenceforth he found it difficult to get his works published and struggled financially. His animus towards Gifford’s organ persisted, writing in The Spirit of the Age in 1825 about the Quarterly Review; “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”.
One of Hazlitt’s legacies to us is this wonderful word, which should be washed down with some bleach and rescued from obscurity.
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