What is a Charlatan?
Charlatan is an English loanword from French, which translates to a “seller of medicines.” On further investigation it appears the French word may derive from an Italian term ciarlare which means fast-talking or prattling. A charlatan in the English sense is not merely a seller of medicines, but a seller of worthless medicines, who bases his/her claims to the efficacy of such medicine on untruthful claims or pseudoscience. Synonyms for the word charlatan include snake oil salesman, mountebank and quack. Records of charlatan activity date back to the early 17th century. A particularly famous Parisian charlatan was Tabarin. He would set up elaborate shows, plays and pantomimes in order to hawk worthless medicines. Such shows functioned not only as way for charlatans to sell their wares, but also gave entertainment to the people. They often attracted crowds, and a few people in the crowds might be “planted,” working for the quack to make false claims about how miraculous a specific produc
What is he selling? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says a charlatan is: ‘An empiric who pretends to wonderful knowledge or secrets.’ No, I’m not sure what an ’empiric’ is either. There’s a tendency to think a charlatan is the same as a grifter or con artist, but, apart from the fact that the product they peddle is in both cases false, the two animals are different in important respects. The Dictionary tells us that a fraud is ‘a criminal deception’. By definition it’s illegal and deliberate. These or similar words don’t appear in the definition of charlatan. Read it again. There’s no suggestion that the charlatan is of necessity a criminal. In fact he may think his product is authentic and made of the finest gold. And this makes sense, doesn’t it? We don’t think of the thousands of astrologers as crooks, even if we hold no belief in the stars. The con artist is in the business for the money. His motivation is greed and his approach is rational and calculating. The charlatan too
