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Updated: May 2, 2025
They are going to live abroad, cut their charities, dismiss old servants, and do all sorts of silly, vindictive things. We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothings in the endowment of research. Not one in twenty of the boys of the middle and upper classes learns German or gets more than a misleading smattering of physical science. Most of them never learn to speak French.
"Deeply learned!" echoed Alf with a laugh, "why, I have only a smattering of them. Just knowledge enough to enable me in some small degree to appreciate the vast amount of knowledge which I have yet to acquire. Why do you look perplexed, Butterface?" "'Cause, massa, you's too deep for me altogidder. My brain no big 'nough to hold it all."
When teachers begin to decline work which they cannot do well, improvements begin to come in. If one will be a successful teacher, he must firmly refuse work which he cannot do successfully. It is a false idea to suppose that everybody is competent to learn or to teach everything. Would our great artists have succeeded equally well in Greek or calculus? A smattering of everything is worth little.
My companions in the workshop were a quiet Dane who spoke German, and a young Frenchman, whom I will call Alcibiade, who had been in London, and acquired a smattering of English. We worked twelve hours a day, commencing at six o’clock in the morning—the whole city was up and busy at that hour—and kept on till seven in the evening.
The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.
Although our boatmen had a smattering of pidjin, or business, English, we were unable to get a very clear idea of Chinese astronomy.
The task begun by Horace Jewdwine was continued by a learned lady, Miss Sophia Roots, B.A.; and Miss Roots did her work so well that when Sir Frederick assumed his rightful guardianship of his daughter he pronounced her the worst educated young woman in Europe. Of all that Miss Roots had so laboriously imparted to her she retained, not a smattering, but a masterly selection.
When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual store of knowledge is superficial a smattering of too many things but superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least, his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business.
In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate hour, this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the showing up of Merman's mistakes and the mere smattering of linguistic and historical knowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorising; but the more learned cited his blunders aside to each other and laughed the laugh of the initiated.
We wish to impress this distinction upon your minds, for the reason that certain writers, who have acquired a smattering of the Hermetic Philosophy, have sought to identify this Seventh Hermetic Principle with wild and fanciful, and often reprehensible, theories and teachings regarding Sex.
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