Smatterers or Scholars?

Found - an obscure book by a forgotten journalist. In the 1920s and up to the early 1950s his short 'thought pieces' were syndicated in the UK and as far as Australia. This tradition of coffee break columns is still with us - now it's Robert Crampton rather than Robert Power. His ideas are oddly prescient given the plethora of information now available. The answer to the second part of Dr Johnson's question is known by everybody - and it's not the Encyclopaedia Britannica! This is from Two-minute talks. Second volume. Robert Power. London: S. W. Partridge [1925] pp.45-46.Other 'talks' have titles such as 'Poppy Friendships', 'Blistering Tongues', 'In the W.P.B.', 'Rich Poverty', 'Are you Popular?', 'Poachers' and 'Rubbernecks.'

Smatterers.

Time was when we used the word "smack" to mean "taste," and thus a taster became known as a "smacker". It is not difficult for a generation of slovenly talkers to corrupt a word, and thus "smacker" or taster has become "smatterer," one who has only a slight, superficial knowledge, a sciolist.

It is a pity that we have not a more handy word to describe such people, for they are very numerous in this age. Perhaps this multiplicity is due to the fact that there are now so many things about which one is expected to know something. Perhaps it is becoming impossible to be a scholar, and that we can hope, at best, to be only a superior smattered.

I trust not.

There is no disgrace in being a smatterer if one has not had an opportunity of becoming a scholar. The taut arises when a smatterer thinks he is a profound scholar, and behaves accordingly.

Old Dr. Johnson laid it down that knowledge is of two kinds - either we know a thing, or we know where we can obtain information about it.

Knowledge is Golden

Seen when emerging from the book fair at the mighty Concourse building on 8th and Brannan this sign seemed to refer to books but it is more about the way that IT has become so big in San Francisco. The mural appears at first to be a ghost sign - i.e. the remnants of some old advertising writing done years back - but this was made in 2012 by the '1: AM' group - Roman Cesario, Jurne, Robert Gonzalez, and Daniel Pan

Dan Pan spoke to Art & Architecture San Francisco about the  mural:

For “Knowledge is Golden” the inspiration was specific to the area which the mural was done. San Francisco is seeing its second gold rush with information and knowledge being the currency of today. SOMA, being slated to be developed as the new downtown of San Francisco with technology leading the transformation, is why we chose this location for our message.
Gold miners have been replaced by tech innovators. Pickaxes and shovels have been replaced with laptops and desktops. Though the times have changed, the human thirst for chasing opportunity remains prevalent in these times. And with this influx of new people, San Francisco culture as we know it will never be the same.

World's most intelligent man

William James Sidis, born in Boston in 1898 to Russian émigré Boris, a psychologist and his wife Sarah, a physician, showed astonishing intellectual qualities from an exceptionally early age. By the age of one he had learned to spell in English. He taught himself to type in French and German at four and by the age of six had added Russian, Hebrew Turkish and Armenian to his repertoire. At five he devised a system which could enable him to name the day of the week on which any date in history fell. Hot-housed by his pushy father, Sidis entered Harvard at eleven, and was soon lecturing on 4 dimensional bodies to the University’s Maths Society. At twelve he suffered his first nervous breakdown, but recovered at his father’s sanatorium, and after returning to Harvard, graduated with first class honours in 1914, aged just sixteen. After a prepared talk at Harvard age 14 , when the audience applauded William turned from the podium and broke into hysterical giggles. Law School followed and by the age of twenty Sidis had become a professor of maths at Texas Rice Institute.

It was then that his troubles began . Looking back at his social gaucheness, hatred of crowds, physical awkwardness and obsessions, it seems very probable that Sidis suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome. But decades before the condition was recognised his eccentricities and aloofness were put down to arrogance. His good looks didn’t help him and he was teased by his female students, especially when he pronounced publicly that he would never marry and intended to live the rest of his life in seclusion.

Chinese 'thirst for knowledge' (1886)

From Book Lore: A Monthly Magazine of Bibliography November 1886 [London]. The Chinese thirst for knowledge in 2013 now manifested by their massive book digitising programmes. Not adepts in the art of war? - the view from 1886.

    The Chinese aptitude for rapidly acquiring knowledge is not so well recognised as it deserves. These patient, plodding people, with their cool, calculating minds, and simple tastes, are more than a match for European workers, no matter what business or profession they elect to follow. A correspondent of the Daily News, writing on the Chinese Question, which is at present forcing itself to the front in North Australia, states that on a recent occasion he took the chaplain's Celestial class, and found that their "hunger and thirst after knowledge, and the startling rapidity with which they got on, was something fearful to contemplate."

The Chinese have libraries in every town and most villages and their reading is of a solid and substantial character. Novels and religious works are everywhere excluded ; the former as too frivolous, and the latter as raising undesirable controversies between sects, which are as numerous there as anywhere else. It seems to us that we have much to learn from the inhabitants of the Flowery Land, adepts in everything except, unfortunately for them, the art of war.