Deipnosophist

Deipnosophist (pronounced dahyp-nos-uh-fist)

Someone noted for their sparkling dinner-table conversation.

1650–1660: From the Ancient Greek Δειπνοσοφισταί (Deipnosophistaí), the title of a literary work in fifteen volumes (translated usually as something like “philosophers at their dinner table”) by the third century scholar Athenaeus of Naucratis, describing learned discussions at a banquet, the construct being δειπνο- (deipno-) (meal) + σοφιστής (sophistḗs).  The plural of sophistḗs was sophistaí and the sense used by Athenaeus was one of “wise men knowledgeable in matters of art & science”.  The now obsolete alternative spelling was dipnosophist.  Deipnosophist, deipnosophistry & deipnosophy are nouns; the noun plural is diepnosophists.

Table talk: Lindsay Lohan at the Fox News table, White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, Washington DC, 2012.

Scholars of Antiquity regard the Deipnosophistaí as a conceptual work encompassing the aspects of life most interesting to the elites of society and these included matters of gastronomy, philosophy, music, literature, women and fine points of grammar.  Structurally, the approach of Athenaeus would have been familiar to twentieth century modernists, the fifteen volumes absorbed by an account of the discussions which transpired during a banquet given by a rich man and attended by two-dozen of those he thought possessed knowledge and conversational skills sufficiently sparkling to be worthy of an invitation; “chaps with some background” as it were.  As a literary (and didactic) technique, this approach was known from Plato’s (circa 427-348 BC) Dialogues but the Deipnosophistaí is a sprawling work and the author made no attempt to disguise the use of the format as a device to explore an extraordinary range of ideas and concepts; he did not claim to be writing a transcript.  Because a substantial part of the text was devoted to the cooking and serving of fine food, in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries, the noun deipnosophist was used also as learned synonym of gourmand and not always in a complimentary way, the English viewing ornate, stylized food as “something continental” and therefore suspicious and the word “sophist” was similarly suspect, used often in the pejorative sense of someone “silver tongued” rather than simple and sincere.

So the Deipnosophistaí was a kind of idealized conversation of the kind only something scripted (and thus artificial) can be.  However, even the most reliable of verbatim transcripts erroneously can convey the impression that what’s been recorded are the words of a deipnosophist because even if annotated, much is missed: the pauses, the volume, the inflections and changes in tone of the voice and perhaps especially the little variations which mean a passage of conversations could have been delivered with confidence of diffidence.  The case study is the distance between conversational reality and the impression which can be left when published in transcript is Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier (Hitler's Table Talk), a series of what were presented as monologues delivered by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) between 1941-1944, mostly over the dinners held in the two Führerhauptquartiere (Führer Headquarters), the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) in what was then East Prussia (present-day Poland) and Werwolf (Werewolf) in the Ukraine.  Because of Hitler’s pattern of life (which became more extreme as the military situation deteriorated), the dinners could be held at any hour and not infrequently extended to the early morning.

Published in several languages between 1953-1954, the transcripts have extensively been studied and while the consensus has always been that while there’s no evidence of any great inaccuracy in terms of what was said (except for some of the material about Christianity which does appear to have been somewhat “embellished” by Martin Bormann (1900–1945; Hitler’s secretary 1941-1945) who hated the churches and the Jews with almost equal vehemence), just about all historians have observed that based on the reports of those who were actually at these meals and listened, a casual reader would gain entirely the wrong impression.  For one thing, what is missing is the repetition.  Hitler had a number of what were really set-piece speeches which for some twenty years he returned to on these occasions, the topics including vegetarianism, his dislike of smoking, the making of artificial honey, the relative merits of various styles of architecture and the history of opera.  For occasional visitors or someone new, the experience of listening to these banalities may have been pleasant enough but many of the regulars interviewed after the war recounted their boredom at the repetition, something noted especially by the military and secretarial staff who listened to the “script” dozens or even hundreds of times; many knew the words off by heart.  So a deipnosophist can’t be judged by words alone, even if recorded verbatim and nor is an audio tape of necessity any better because obviously the visual clues which lend so much to meaning are lost.