This rare, but still used, word turned up in a headline recently.
A British composer named George Fenton had just died.
His obituary said that he had composed music for such British TV series as Bergerac, Newsnight, The Blue Planet, and The Lady in the Van (among many others).
Fenton was 76.
He began by getting a few guitar lessons (from a chimney sweep, would you believe!)
He had a couple of good music teachers when he was in school, but that was the end of his formal musical education (he skipped university).
The report, in the London Daily Telegraph, said that George Fenton belonged to an endangered species—the great British ‘autodidact.’
The word just means ‘self-taught.’
It’s adapted from the Latin word autodidactus and first appeared in English in 1535.
The newspaper article went on to say that ‘Shakespeare, the “upstart crow”, whose dramatic presumption was sneered at by the University wit Robert Greene, is the archetype of the self-educated savant whose talents later flourished.’
So the greatest poet/playwright who ever lived was an ‘autodidact.’
Then the article talked about the great writers of the 19th century: ‘The great novelists of the age seem almost driven to fiction by their lack of formal education. The rage for self-expression burned fiercely in writers excluded from a university education by sex (George Eliot, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell) or poverty (Dickens and Hardy).’
I suspect that some of the word crew who join us here each day on Ozwords are also ‘autodidacts’—people who now know far more about words and language than they ever expected to know; knowledge that just accumulated as a result of their own insatiable curiosity.
You may well be a member of the great Autodidacts Club!
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BY THE WAY...
If you'd like to see my A-Z list of Aussie slang, you'll find it here in the Australian Geographic website -- A-Z list of Aussie slang. Here’s the link: The A-Z of Aussie slang - Australian Geographic
The liveliest part of this website is usually the Q and A page -- be sure to check it out from time to time.
