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Hooray for amateurs!
Mar. 23rd, 2006 09:37 amSomewhere along the way, the word "amateur" acquired a spate of pejorative associations. The online Merriam Webster offers "dilettante," "dabbler," and "tyro" as adjectives, describing one who "follows a pursuit without attaining proficiency or professional status." Other excerpts:
"one practicing an art without mastery of its essentials"
"usually implies elegant trifling in the arts"
"an absence of serious commitment"
"desultory habits of work and lack of persistence"
"inexperience often combined with audacity"
About the only meaning not imbued with scorn is the one related to athletics, involving "avoidance of direct remuneration." This used to be a big deal back when people were serious - and it was possible to be serious - about the distinction (I seem to recall there was an Olympian whose medal was taken away when it was discovered that, years previously, said athlete had received payment for playing in a baseball game or something. How sport has changed, eh?)
And yet, I've been aware of amateurs hitting the news wires in recent times.
There was the amateur who applied image-processing algorithms to NASA images from Mars and found incredibly large dust storms roaming the landscape.
There was the amateur (several, if memory serves) who reanalyzed the Mars data sent back by the Viking spacecraft and found a circadian (for Mars) cycle, the existence of which had never been suspected. (How the cycle is to be explained is apparently a lively issue of discussion.)
There was the amateur who took data from the Soviet-era Venera probes and produced interesting views of Venus.
There was the amateur who just recently found two impact craters by looking through Google Earth, and yet another who recently used his 10-inch telescope and a camera to produce images of Jupiter that are about as good as what Voyager produced about a generation ago.
Amateur comes to us from the French, who in turn got it from the Latin (amare, to love). People who engage in something on an amateur level do it because they love it, not because it's a job. I seem to recall that one of the finest examples of translation (Omar's Rubaiyat) was done by an amateur, Edward FitzGerald, and it has been argued that the quality of his translations (he refined his verses over some period of time) was due to both his gifts as a translator and the fact that he didn't have a day job to worry about.
Cheers...
About the only meaning not imbued with scorn is the one related to athletics, involving "avoidance of direct remuneration." This used to be a big deal back when people were serious - and it was possible to be serious - about the distinction (I seem to recall there was an Olympian whose medal was taken away when it was discovered that, years previously, said athlete had received payment for playing in a baseball game or something. How sport has changed, eh?)
And yet, I've been aware of amateurs hitting the news wires in recent times.
There was the amateur who applied image-processing algorithms to NASA images from Mars and found incredibly large dust storms roaming the landscape.
There was the amateur (several, if memory serves) who reanalyzed the Mars data sent back by the Viking spacecraft and found a circadian (for Mars) cycle, the existence of which had never been suspected. (How the cycle is to be explained is apparently a lively issue of discussion.)
There was the amateur who took data from the Soviet-era Venera probes and produced interesting views of Venus.
There was the amateur who just recently found two impact craters by looking through Google Earth, and yet another who recently used his 10-inch telescope and a camera to produce images of Jupiter that are about as good as what Voyager produced about a generation ago.
Amateur comes to us from the French, who in turn got it from the Latin (amare, to love). People who engage in something on an amateur level do it because they love it, not because it's a job. I seem to recall that one of the finest examples of translation (Omar's Rubaiyat) was done by an amateur, Edward FitzGerald, and it has been argued that the quality of his translations (he refined his verses over some period of time) was due to both his gifts as a translator and the fact that he didn't have a day job to worry about.
Cheers...
