All About You

The English language is fascinating. Every now and then I hear or read a word I never came across before in my life, and it immediately appears to be useful. How did I even manage to live without it for so long?

My recent discovery is ultracrepidarian (1). The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as

Someone who has no special knowledge of a subject but who expresses an opinion about it.

I guess we all know members of that species, and who knows, maybe we belong to it ourselves?

The other day when I was about closing the door of our Dojo, heading for the ice-cream shop with my little daughter, an elderly lady chat me up: “Is this your place? I forgot the name of your landlady!”

A funny introduction I thought. But operating a Zen Dojo necessarily opens up the opportunity to interact with many slightly unusual sorts of people. I told her the name of our landlady and the old lady replied “No no no, that’s not it. I am a ceramics artist and want to use the space as an exhibition for my art objects! Maybe we can cooperate?” Politely I explained this is a Zen Dojo and our only art is Japanese calligraphy. And as a kind of excuse I added “anyway, only very few people come to visit”.

“Of course not!” the lady replied “your place is so cluttered when one looks inside!” I thought she was referring to the workshop section where I mount calligraphy scrolls, but I was wrong. “All those posters hanging on the wall with signs nobody can read! If you get rid of them, likely more people will come!”

… more people will come! That also was the promise of a local coffee shop owner who frequented our Dojo for some private lesson with the wooden sword. He suggested I should serve coffee and cake, not just having people sit silently on a cushion during Zazen. “If I don’t serve anything at my coffee shop, of course people won’t come just to sit around!”.

Oh well, that is my life I thought. So often people feel provoked to let me know what they think about me. Be it strangers, friends, students or family. I feel like getting thumbs up or down all the time, one star ratings, three or five, morning to night. But why? I rarely ever tell people what I think of them. I believe it is rude, also I am convinced what I think about another person usually is wrong, just my thoughts. And I do not want any one around me act in a certain way to get a thumbs up or five stars from me.

Who’ll tell me those lies?
Let me think they’re true, yeah
I heard one or two
They weren’t about me
They weren’t about her
They were all about you

The Rolling Stones, “All About You”

Being an ultracrepidarian, telling another person your opinion about them, is usually saying more about yourself: your lack of special knowledge, your prejudice and your inability to have a closer look. Do you really want to interact with other people being seen like that?

“Put a sock in it!” is another very British phrase I learned long ago at the The Musical Museum in London, when our guide demonstrated how to mute an old fashioned gramophone (with his sock). How often a day I think or say to myself better put a sock in it … maybe I should write a scroll for our Dojo wall with those words, instead of Chinese characters nobody can read?

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(1) Derived from the Latin saying ne supra crepidam (“not beyond the shoe”) and attested in the English essayist William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_supra_crepidam

(2) If you are not too much put off by the mess, please feel invited to come in and ask, we are happy to translate it for you!