smatterers

Alexander Solzhenitsyn called such people "smatterers" (although he was referring to the debased intelligentsia that pimped for the Soviet state)

Stinky Inky, Part V: Dinesh D'Souza and the Smatterers at the Philadelphia Inquirer 2007

Our early love of roguery makes us generally run away from instruction; and so we become mere smatterers in the sciences we are put to learn; and, because we will know no more, think there is no more to be known.

Clarissa Harlowe 2006

When reached in his London office, Newton declined to comment, saying only that he had "no use for little smatterers in mathematics."

Monty Python it is not - The Panda's Thumb 2005

Not any of them make greater account of those smatterers at Greek than if they were daws.

In Praise of Folly c. 1466-1536 1958

But the following snatch from _Yes and No_ proves that these smatterers of fashion -- these clippers of reputation -- are encouraged by some portion of that class whose vanities they affect to expose: --

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 10, No. 289, December 22, 1827 Various

It is remarkable that his lordship's family have been smatterers in wit and learning for three generations: his grandfather has left monuments of his good taste in several rhyming tragedies, and the romance of Parthenissa.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague Melville, Lewis 1925

The difficulty is to keep your place when you get old and stiff, and younger smatterers are pushing up behind you.

The Longest Journey 1924

Hence in no country were there so many orators, or so many smatterers.

A History of Caroline County, Virginia 1924

This, he considered, was the only basis of solid instruction; all other means of education were mere charlatanism, and could produce nothing better than smatterers.

I. Tom’s “First Half”. Book II—School-Time 1917

The beginners and the smatterers are always "students of nature," and suppose that to be so will suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature.

Albert Durer T. Sturge Moore 1907