Quote:
Thursday 10 April 2003 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). 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”. What Hazlitt thought of Gifford’s journal may be deduced 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.
|
Ultracrepidarians are a grrr.