"Amateur Cricketer"

--- by JLS
------ For the GC

----- JASON KENNEDY ADDS "WRITERS" ('TO THEIR HONOUR OR DISHONOUR") TO L. J. Kramer's list of people who should be concerned with theta-ellipisis in conventional implicatum-cum-embedder, "philosophers, linguists, and dilettantes".

---

To consider -- the Italian in me is immune to the bad implicatum the thing got from the Italian onto English -- it's TOO connected with 'delight' which cannot but be a good thing -- as per below.

When Grice died, the Times, as is its wont, published an ANONYMOUS obit, which I think should be ILLEGAL. It ran, as per title, "Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer", or "Amateur cricketer and professional philosopher". I hated it! (but I loved it, too!). The thing does dwell on his amateur cricketing -- not really amateur. If I had invested so much energy on cricket as he did -- playing for Oxfordshire, attending the league matches of the North Oxford Cricket Club, and spending ALL SUMMERS FOR 30 years in the tours, I would have expected the 'cricketer' would have done.

When the professional (middle class, for sure) come marching in, it is us, the gentlemen, who have to be retronymed. Not fair! In the old days of "Country cricket" -- the only DISTINGUISHE form of the game -- it was ALL 'gentlemen'. A Professional Cricketer would just NOT be invited to the right parties and meetings. With later Victorian society, Grace became a sort of a hero, but still not quite 'the' thing. The ethics of 'cricket' is too immersed in the very backbone of the 'gentleman', not the 'player' -- as in Hughes's masterpiece about Tom Brown (in Rugby and his failure of the sequel, "Tom Brown in Oxford"): "Cricket should be to an English boy what the Habeas corpus is to an Englishman."

-----

Of course 'professional philosopher' is just as insulting (I love it). The man was a don at Oxford for years. What else would you have assigned, job wise, to a genius like him? He couldn't have done practical things: he was for higher, eschatological reflections, and he found the atmosphere pretty peaceful -- the dreaming spires and all that: conveniently situated not far from London, in the glory of the English countryside, close to Cricket Country, etc. and pretty well catered with the type he enjoyed most: intelligent Englishmen (Pears, Strawson, Austin, Hare, Urmson, Warnock, Thompson, Paul, Nowell-Smith, Hampshire) of his exact generation -- his "Play Group") that kept his Saturday mornings busy and the eventual weekly seminar co-jointly given.

Now for dilettante. From the online etymological dictionary:

dilettante. 1733, borrowing of Italian dilettante, a lover of music or painting, from the Italian verb "dilettare", to delight. Making this a present-tense participle. The 'delighter'. Cfr. amante, amare. The lover is the one that loves, not the one loved. The dilettante is the delighter. He delights. Implicature: others. But also self. I think this is a object-drop case. "He delights". "He delights in" invites the wrong implicature. The reference to 'music and painting' is otiose or misleading. Surely a truly Epicurean can delight with food -- vide Stephen Fry, or sex, etc.

One problem here is the imperative, or volitive, or under-one's-rational control. "I delight". Surely it's up to the addressee, or the dropped object to decide, "You do NOT". "You "call" yourself a 'dilettante', but you delight nobody but yourself". That would be a rude thing to say. And in any case, what has music or painting have to do with it. Surely it's not the (POORLY PAID) musician or the (POORLY PAID) painter who are the delighters. It's like the delighters delight IN music and painting -- so "delight" is really a euphemism or a transcategorial eschatological epithet-barrierer here. I.e. like the 'healthy' in 'healthy cow', 'healthy food'. The 'delight' belongs to the subject who delights in music and painting, say. And the delighter is, strictly, in this case, the music or the painting. The OBJECT of the delight.

But the talk of object and subject here is confusing and too Kantian. It's best to symbolise it by "x"

x delights.

where x can be, a piece of music (never a song), a painting.

x is a delighter.

(strictly, a piece of music is a delighter; a painting is a delighter).

But this is not the use as per 'dilettante'. It seems it _is_ restricted to ANIMATED.


The online dictionary goes on

"from L. delectare (see delight). Originally without negative connotation [implicatum], "devoted amateur,"

---- and we see here the connection

amo, amare -- amans (Italian, 'borrowed' from the nt form, 'amante')
French, amour, aimer, amateur.

--- The 'devoted' confused things totally:

"Grice was a devoted cricketer, but not a devoted philosopher". WRONG! So the idea of the 'devotion' IS misleading. The whole point of a good dilettante is that nothing is so much an object of one's devotion. It's:

1. the mesotes, as it were -- 'meden agan', ne quis nimis. Nothing excessively. Cfr. 'get a life'.

2. the 'round education' -- "Renaissance man" sort of thing. A SAINT is devoted (to his or her relation). To be 'devoted' to something OTHER than what it involves a 'vow' (Votum) seems obscene, or otiose. Or something.

The Online Dictionary goes on:

"the pejorative sense emerged late 18c. by contrast with professional."

Exactly. With Grace. There is a good statue of Grace somewhere else. I COLLECT iconology of sculpture (glyptothecque) and know ALL about sculptures of cricketers. My favourite, by far, the friese at Lords's in St. John's Woods, London -- so art deco it hurts).

With Grace and his ilk, rather. Grace was still amateur enough:

"Grace was a medical practitioner who qualified in 1879. Because of his profession, he was nominally an amateur cricketer but he is said to have made more money from his cricketing activities than any professional."

So one may still want to find who the first disgrICER to the 'profession' (ha) was!