This week’s theme
Eponyms

This week’s words
Carrollian
hiren
Crichtonism


Wordsmith Games

🧩	Jigsaw Riddle The Spotted Cat
🌍	Langitude Trace piltdowner home

A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(KRY-tuh-niz-uhm)

MEANING:

noun: Extraordinary accomplishment in many fields.

ETYMOLOGY:

After James Crichton (1560-1582), a Scottish scholar, linguist, debater, and man of letters whose reputation for wide-ranging brilliance led to the epithet the Admirable Crichton. Earliest documented use: 1850.

NOTES:

James Crichton was a young Scot with a reputation as a polymath, or polyhistor. He is said to have entered college at 10 and taken both bachelor’s and master’s degrees by 14 or 15.

Accounts credited him with a dazzling range of accomplishments, including medicine, law, astronomy, arms, horsemanship, philosophy, music, and debate.

According to the writer Sir Thomas Urquhart, Crichton issued a challenge in Paris to answer questions in “any science, liberal art, discipline, or faculty, whether practical or theoretic”.

Maybe, I thought.

But when I read that he offered to answer any question in any field in 12 languages, my bullshit detector went into overdrive. Sure, Jan.

Let’s just say Urquhart’s account of the Admirable Crichton was a bit embellished. And by a bit, I mean he turned a talented polymath into a Renaissance superhero.

USAGE:

“Zuleika Dobson typifies the irreverent deflation of the myth of Crichtonism which was prevalent at the turn of the century.”
Mortimer R. Proctor; The English University Novel; University of California Press; 1957.

“[The Dean] was a brilliant light at Oxford, and came over to illumine our darkness, and if pedantry could only supply the deficiency in the potato crop, he would be a providence to the land. His affectation is to know everything ... His failures in these attempts at Admirable Crichtonism would abash even confidence great as his.”
Charles Lever; Roland Cashel; Chapman and Hall; 1850.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: