Who Coined the Term, Anyway?

"Ultracrepidarianism" · Who Coined the Term, Anyway? · Copyright Laws and Casuistry

Le terme ultracrepidarian a été utilisé pour la première fois en 1819 par l'essayiste William Hazlitt dans une lettre ouverte au critique littéraire William Gifford. Son étymologie est relative à la locution latine Sutor, ne supra crepidam signifiant littéralement "cordonnier, pas plus haut que la chaussure".

https://www.my-mooc.com/fr/podcast/qu-est-ce-que-l-ultracrepidarianisme/

The term ultracrepidarian was first used in 1819 by the essayist William Hazlitt in an open letter to the literary critic William Gifford. Its etymology is to the Latin saying "ne sutor ultra crepidam," literally, "let the cobbler go no higher than the sandal."

Here, I have detected the source:

In comparing yourself with others, you make a considerable mistake. You suppose the common advantages of a liberal education to be something peculiar to yourself, and calculate your progress beyond the rest of the world from the obscure point at which you first set out. Yet your overweening self-complacency is never easy but in the expression of your contempt for others; 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. From the difficulty you yourself have in constructing a sentence of common grammar, and your frequent failures, you instinctively presume that no author who comes under the lash of your pen can understand his mother-tongue: and again, you suspect every one who is not your “very good friend” of knowing nothing of the Greek or Latin, because you are surprised to think how you came by your own knowledge of them.

Page 2 of Mr. Hazlitt's letter to Mr. Gifford.
No. 585. SUNDAY, MARCH 14, 1819.
https://www.lordbyron.org/doc.php?&choose=LeHunt.1819.Hazlitt2.xml

The point is not giving an opinion on matters unrelated to one's formal training. The fact is, to much of history, the élite were not eager to have such a thing.

Like in the anecdote about Apelles and the cobbler, it has nothing to do about showing Dunning Kruger in action, as the word is now used, but all of having a small-minded eagerness to cavil and a proportionally small base from which to cavil from.

While Hazlitt could be wrong, even terribly wrong, about Gifford (it was after all clearly obviously said in a quarrell), he is at least not subscribing to "chacun son métier et les vaches seront bien gardées"* like a French farmer who, for all his noble qualities, like a Gipsy, is not the best placed to decide on what is done in letters. Actually, I hail (spiritually, and in part) from a Scanian somewhat negligent cowboy, who learned Greek while the cows were grazing, Frans G. Bengtsson.

So, no, I was wrong to suspect that Hazlitt's personal apostasy from the religion of an already apostate father (Unitarian, not freethinker that one) had given him an inclination to found this kind of superstition - it's still a kind of omen that it came from him.

Apelles, now ... in Pliny we can read, with proper wikipedian abreviation in English:

Another refers to his practice of exhibiting his works in the front of his shop, then hiding nearby to hear the comments of passers-by. When a cobbler commented on his mistakes in painting a shoe, Apelles made the corrections that very night; the next morning the cobbler noticed the changes, and proud of his effect on the artist's work began to criticize how Apelles portrayed the leg—whereupon Apelles emerged from his hiding-place to state: Ne sutor ultra crepidam—"Let the shoemaker venture no further than the shoe."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apelles#Legacy

It has very little to do with a debate about ideas, and all about a quarrel - like between Hazlitt and Gifford - between two people with some artsy accomplishment, and a kind of social envy on the part of the lower accomplishment.

And while, to the modern world, at its worst and most modern, the ultracrepidarian par excellence is the essayist or blogger, the expressions involved come from two in fact largely untrained essayists, Hazlitt and Pliny. Indeed, if you want to learn to draw, there are probably more lessons to be had from a mangaka than from Pliny and his essays on Apelles. And why did Hazlitt chose the epithet about Gifford? Probably this is more important than anything Gifford actually wrote:

Poet, scholar, and editor who began as a shoemaker's apprentice; after Oxford he published The Baviad (1794), The Maeviad (1795), and The Satires of Juvenal translated (1802) before becoming the founding editor of the Quarterly Review (1809-24).

William Gifford
(1756-1826)
https://www.lordbyron.org/persRec.php?&selectPerson=WiGiffo1826

Ah, a shoemaker's apprentice! Like, once upon a time, before distilling, my grandpa ... after Oxford, I highly doubt that Gifford was really a bad critic, with no ability. I find it much more likely, that Hazlitt who came to school from the first, had a social disdain for Gifford. It could even be that in expressing it, he invented non-extant feelings about Gifford's English being incorrect./HGL

* To each his trade, and that's how the cows are well guarded.