You’re an expert? You would be surprised
We watch interviews with experts on television and read their quotes in other media. We hear from his testimony in the courts of law, where his opinion seems to influence even matters of life and death. As a culture, we keep this separate class of functionally separate individuals as a kind of undefined priesthood.
So my mind wants to get to the root of the question. What does the word expert really mean? Where does it come from? What is your pedigree?
My favorite source of reference for those moments of mental curiosity in the soft belly of our recent explosion of human-language monkey memes is inevitably the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary at etymonline.com.
Etymology is the study of the origin of words. And the beauty of the Online Etymology Dictionary is at least threefold:
• It is free to access online
• Provides a good overview of the known history of most words.
• Usually appears at the top of a web search for the word that is searching the most for the word “etymology”.
Of course, if you really want to dig deeper and review what’s left in the hot, wet compost heap of the English language, a great place to turn would be the Oxford English Dictionary, which is one of the sources for the Online Etymology Dictionary. . .
So now, let’s get straight to the point. Here’s the entry for the word expert:
late 14c., from Old French expert and directly from Latin expertus, past participle of experiri “to try, to try” (see experience). The substantive sense of “person wise through experience” existed in 15c., Reappeared in 1825.
How cool is that? We can now see that, as with the Romans, this past participle of a word extended its linguistic reach from Rome to Brittany, through France. We now know that the original quality identified in the concept of expertise is wisdom born of experience, having already proven the relevant topic.
How enlightening it is to learn that it is not academic learning that makes you an expert, but rather your experience of having tried and tested something in the practical context of your life. I bet that qualifies you as an expert in at least some areas. What do you think?
Now this opens up a whole new layer of very interesting, and for me, unavoidable questions. I suppose I can now accept that I am an expert writer, having tested and honed that skill in a dozen books. But I would say that such a level of experience, while a valuable benchmark, does not necessarily make me an authority on writing, and that is why I am here … to hone my skills to a sharper point.
The final question I will conclude with is whether anyone can be a true expert on something that cannot be proven in real life. This could apply to areas such as theoretical physics as well as the law of man. A black hole has never been tested or proven directly, but simply inferred by extrapolation and contemplated with mathematics. The same is true for the Big Bang theory. In fact, these two theories only exist in mutually incompatible mathematical “worlds.”
Similarly, in the modern system of jurisprudence, which, as the word ‘expert’ owes its heritage to the Romans, we have notions that exist “only in the contemplation of the law,” as the legal fiction of the corporations that now govern our earthly governments.
Perhaps it is time to recognize that if these are fictions that no human being can gain experience with, we should stop putting so much collective life force into them? What do you think?
