Winning steps ⦠Oti Mabuse and Bill Bailey on the TV show Strictly Come Dancing.
Photograph: Guy Levy/BBC/PA
Most highly skilled fields have rude names for beginners. In surfing youâre a âkookâ, in chess a âpatzerâ, in competitive cycling a âFredâ and in the US army a âbootâ. âDilettanteâ, from the Italian
dilettare, to delight, has come to mean a frivolous dabbler. âAmateurâ, with its roots in the French word for love, now often means inept, bungling, uncommitted.
And yet there has never been a better time to be a beginner. Learning platforms such as Coursera, Skillshare and Duolingo sell you an experience that you can fit around your busy life, achieving mastery in short bursts. The enforced inertia of lockdown seems to have led to a wave of intellectual and creative self-improvement, at least for the first few weeks. As a man arrested for illegally performing cosmetic surgery put it: âPretty close to anything you want to learn you can learn off YouTube for free.â More than 100 âSmule babiesâ have been reported by couples who met performing duets on the online singing app.