dilettant

The sainted O'Connor is actually the archetype of the vapid jurist who for 20 years injected her personal feelings into law rather than go with deep-rooted intellectual judicial philosophy...a reason why the quite dissimilar Scalia and Ginsburg are such good friends..they are not the dilettant sort O'Connor was.

Rudy's running... and talking about abortion. Ann Althouse 2007

A miserable bungler, a wretched dilettant — or have you another word for it?

Maurice Guest 2003

He was not quite to be despised as a rival, this "snowy-banded, dilettant, delicate-handed priest."

The Wharf by the Docks A Novel Florence Warden 1893

This racial individuality is our immediate hope; it is our safeguard against mere craftsmanship, against dilettant dexterity, against cleverness for its own sake, against the danger that our cosmopolitanism may degenerate into Alexandrianism and that our century may come to be like the age of the Antonines, when a "cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning," so Gibbon tells us, and

Inquiries and Opinions Brander Matthews 1890

Verse, however exquisite, is almost valueless if its appeal is merely technical or merely academic, if it pleases only the sophisticated palate of the dilettant, if it fails to touch the heart of the plain people.

Inquiries and Opinions Brander Matthews 1890

After sudden outbursts of genius and creativeness, he wanders away in the direction of license and egotism; the degenerate artist and thinker makes room for the sophist and the dilettant. "

Outline of Universal History George Park Fisher 1868