This discussion causes me to consider the differences in knowledge or performance skills between what was accessible in ancient times and those of the modern era and, with it, the evolution of the word “
dilettante” for which the modern meaning is: “a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge.”
When the word first appeared, it was used as a
compliment when referring to someone who knew a “great deal” in several branches of knowledge: medicine, mathematics, astronomy, music, and what-have-you. Often, dilettantes were privileged members of society who could afford to devote their time to the acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills, such as playing a musical instrument and learning-everything-there-was-to-know in a field of science. In a broad sense, a dilettante “knew all that was knowable” because the knowledge base itself was very narrow. However, with time, the knowledge base expanded and deepened, giving rise to true “specialists” in increasingly widening fields of knowledge or skill in the performing arts. As a result, anyone possessing what-had-once-been considered a significant level of knowledge, when compared to the superior knowledge and skills of specialists, became to be regarded as having only a superficial level of knowledge and the word took on its modern,
pejorative sense.
Ancient students of foreign languages may have developed
only a lower-intermediate level of competence in a handful of related languages but would have merited the
compliment of “dilettante” by those who either chose not to do so or who did not have access to the knowledge base. In today’s world, my own on-again, off-again, attempts at maintaining an intermediate level in these same languages merit me no more than the modern,
pejorative, meaning of the word.
EDITED:
Typos, tinkering.