Dislike a journalist, website, or publication because of their political commentary? If you write a review, try to beat this:
“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.”
That’s from a letter written by William Hazlitt to the Quarterly Review in 1819. It goes on in that general vein so much and so well that it’s been called “one of the finest works of invective in the language.” In another part of the letter Hazlitt calls the editor of the Review an “ultracrepidarian.” His was the first use of the word ever recorded, so he may well have coined it himself, but nobody knows for sure. An “ultracrepidarian” gives opinions about things they don’t know anything about. The word comes from an allusion to something that happened in ancient Greece. There was a famous painter, Apelles, who liked to put his pictures up in public and hide nearby to hear what people said.
In once case a shoemaker complained that a sandal in a picture had too many loops. Apelles fixed it. This apparently fed the shoemaker’s ego a bit too much, so next he complained about the leg the sandal was attached to. As the famous scribe Pliny described it later (in Rome), Apelles told the shoemaker he shouldn’t judge beyond the sandals. There’s even an English proverb based on this story: “the cobbler should stick to his last” (a “last” is a pattern used by shoemakers). But Pliny, of course, was using Latin, so what he actually wrote was “ne supra crepidam judcaret”. This idea caught on in Latin (well before the English proverb) and was expressed in different ways, the most common being “ultra crepidam”, which is short for “ne sutor ultra crepidam.” “Crepidam” comes from the Greek word “krepis” (shoe), and you’re probably familiar with “ultra” (to go beyond). So although “ultra crepidam” has a literal meaning that doesn’t mean much (“going beyond shoemaking”), every educated person up until about 1940 (except in the US and Prussia, of course, where the educational systems were designed solely to prepare young people for factory jobs) would understand that it referred to the episode conveyed by Pliny.
Hazlitt (probably) created “ultracrepidarian” out of “ultra” and “crepidam.” As I mentioned, “crepidam” comes from the Greek word for shoe: “krepis,” and there’s another obscure English word based on it: “crepidarian,” which means “pertaining to a shoemaker.”
Hazlitt is famous enough that there’s an online literary magazine called Hazlitt: https://hazlitt.net/.
