Criticasters

Michael Quinion had this today in his "weird words" section of World Wide Words:

Criticaster  /krItI'kast@(r)/

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It's not much met with now, more's the pity. This is one of its rare modern appearances in print:

    If I were deemed kosher by that classist, racist,

misogynistic bunch of criticasters, I would consider it time to retire my pens and legal pads.

    [A letter by Erica Jong in The New York Times, 1 Feb.

1998, on learning that her book, Of Blessed Memory, had been nominated for The Literary Review's Bad Sex Award.]

You may gather it is uncomplimentary. It refers to those who set themselves up as arbiters of taste and literary discernment but whose sensibilities are inadequate to the task. A blast against such petty critics was penned 150 years ago:

    What amount of obtuseness will disqualify a criticaster who itches to be tinkering and cobbling the noblest passages of thought that ever issued from mortal brain, while at the same time he stumbles and bungles in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness, as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to explain? [Notes and Queries, 11 Jun. 1853.]

It was coined in the late seventeenth century by adding the ending "-aster" to "critic". The suffix came directly into English from Latin, where it meant an incomplete resemblance. English adapted it to refer to a person of inferior or inadequate qualities. It turns up in a small number of words, of which "poetaster", a person who writes bad poetry, and "philosophaster", a shallow or pretentious philosopher, are the least rare. Others of similar form - though almost never employed by anybody - are "politicaster", a petty or contemptible politician, "mathematicaster", a minor or inferior mathematician, and "witticaster", an inferior wit or witling.

I thought it worth quoting in full since it could so well apply to a large majority of bloggers. I must remember "witling" for future use.