"A man of letters"?

[TSherbs]

1 hour ago, ParramattaPaul said:

Perhaps all he wanted was rhe replies and not a conversation. 

Maybe a pub wager was being settled this way....

 

I want my free pint 🍺

[Jerome Tarshis]

Dictionary.com offers these two definitions:

 

a man engaged in literary pursuits, especially a professional writer.

a man of great learning; scholar.

 

I am a professional writer, and so would be inclined to the first definition. Many professional writers are very far from either great learning or scholarship.

 

John Gross's excellent book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters pays particular attention to book reviewers, people who wrote essays about books, and arbiters of taste, not entirely to exclude poets and fiction writers, but to emphasize the larger world of literary discussion.

 

Virginia Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was certainly one of England's pre-eminent men of letters although, unlike his daughter and son-in-law, not a "creative" writer. At lower levels the world of letters includes many who serve as, relatively speaking, hewers of wood and drawers of water, and fill real social needs without being adornments of the humanities. (At best I fall into this last category.)

[inkstainedruth]

1 hour ago, TSherbs said:

Maybe a pub wager was being settled this way....

 

I want my free pint 🍺

Me too.  And it had better be (as an old TV ad I saw in the UK in the 1970s for Guinness said) "the usual"....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[ParramattaPaul]

1 hour ago, inkstainedruth said:

"the usual"....

That's a Harp Lager for me thank you.

[Lachryma]

On 7/14/2021 at 11:11 AM, LizEF said:

Just so I don't completely ruin your thread...  I've always understood this to mean someone with a university-level education in the arts / humanities.

Ditto. I majored in Letters for a while, with a minor in Romance Languages.  I left that for Deaf Ed with ASL, though.  If I had all the $ in the world, I'd drop everything and go right back to school for that.  I love what I do, interpreter, but the idea of going back to school and just studying hist/humanities/the classics/languages . . . Ahhhh . . . Wistful sigh.

[ParramattaPaul]

1 minute ago, Lachryma said:

Ditto. I majored in Letters for a while, with a minor in Romance Languages.  I left that for Deaf Ed with ASL, though.  If I had all the $ in the world, I'd drop everything and go right back to school for that.  I love what I do, interpreter, but the idea of going back to school and just studying hist/humanities/the classics/languages . . . Ahhhh . . . Wistful sigh.

That's your retirement planned then, isn't it?

[Lachryma]

Just now, ParramattaPaul said:

That's your retirement planned then, isn't it?

Actually, my retirement plan is the peace corp!

[inkstainedruth]

Wow!  That's impressive, Lachryma!

When I was a junior in high school we had a several class trip to Washington, DC, to go to various agencies parts of government, and interact with people who worked at them.  One of the places was the Peace Corps and we interviewed someone who had just come back from 3 years in some country in West Africa (sorry, too many decades have passed and I don't remember which country now).  Part of the time she was in the capital, making public health posters (she'd been an art major in college) to be put up around the city.  She said she got to the point where she was actually DREAMING in the local language.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Mark from Yorkshire]

I have BSc in in earth sciences and am a fellow of the a respected earth science related professional body. 
 

so not really letters or Humanities