learnedness

Praise him and show your learnedness and you climb the social ladder. And as you climb the ladder pretty soon you've fully bought into the status quo yourself.

It's only been a few hundred years since northern europe was a complete backwater and classical arab culture was the center of learnedness around that part of the world. The middle east is a mess these days.

Does anyone have good sources of information on historical levels of "learnedness" in the United States? And it might be interesting to compare that measure to the number of years of formal education.

As the editors came and went at Peretz’s favor, Wieseltier ruled a sort of archipelago of learnedness in the magazine’s back pages—haunted by its own testy thoroughgoing-ness, dense with type and argument, and deliberately off-putting. [...

They fail to appreciate that his depth of extended expertise is never more than ankle-deep, and breadth very agonizingly chosen so as to min-max in terms of knowledge required to signal learnedness to the unlearned. he'll say some poncy shit like « flâneur » out of context just because his readers are unfamiliar with it.

I don't want to act like I know a ton about the trades, but I'd like to think that there is some similarity in mastery of Software Engineering to being a master craftsman in both learnedness and years of practice.