I went to the library to look it up in one of their big dictionaries. I would not have been surprised to see it read: dilettante: If you are reading this, you are not one.
(A) ROFL. Priceless. (B) But, is it true that autodidact refers to "working things out from first principles" and not "working things out without guidance or information given by another person"? The first hit on google is a word of the day, the quote being "Consider the autodidact in Sartre's Nausea, who is somewhat unbelievably working his way alphabetically through an entire library."
(B) I was using autodidact for self-taught, to refer to myself going to the library to look up how to pronounce dilettante rather than happening to be taught how at school. Pulling the info, not having it pushed to me. I don't know if that is a correct usage - I'd have to look it up ;-)
BTW, I found I had been pronouncing dilettante incorrectly for years. I've not had a moment like that since misled - which, misleadingly, is not pronounced "my-zuld".
misled is very common - the philology lecturer at Oxford used to have a long string of auto A) and B) heterodidacts who got it wrong. learning more words from books than people, it wasn't till his lecturers that I realised not to pronounce all the syllables in miscellaneous
Though I think I'm missing the joke -- Is there any non-obvious way of pronouncing it? Aren't self-taught people much more likely to not know pronunciations because they're a lot harder to learn in isolation? Is one of those two the point? :)
Ah! I see. Yes, actually, a diagram probably would have helped me follow :)
Unfortunately, now my brain is full of the image of a dilettante muttering "'eet'? 'et'? Hmmm... I really don't know how to pronounce that. Could it be 'it'?"
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dilettante: If you are reading this, you are not one.
I love that it comes from diletarre delight.
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(B) But, is it true that autodidact refers to "working things out from first principles" and not "working things out without guidance or information given by another person"? The first hit on google is a word of the day, the quote being "Consider the autodidact in Sartre's Nausea, who is somewhat unbelievably working his way alphabetically through an entire library."
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BTW, I found I had been pronouncing dilettante incorrectly for years. I've not had a moment like that since misled - which, misleadingly, is not pronounced "my-zuld".
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A)exactly right
B)taught by others, made up by me
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Though I think I'm missing the joke -- Is there any non-obvious way of pronouncing it? Aren't self-taught people much more likely to not know pronunciations because they're a lot harder to learn in isolation? Is one of those two the point? :)
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Unfortunately, now my brain is full of the image of a dilettante muttering "'eet'? 'et'? Hmmm... I really don't know how to pronounce that. Could it be 'it'?"
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