0 a person who is or seems to be interested in a subject, but whose understanding of it is not very deep or serious:
1 a person who is or seems to be interested in a subject, but who is not involved with it in a serious and determined way:
Is he a pretentious postmodern dilettante barely concealing his limitations behind mannered overwrought wordplay and the needless over-ornamentation of derivative rock songs and genre pastiches?
This disc reveals a fine composer, not a dilettante hiding behind an unusual tuning.
What the dilettante think - that knowledge of any intellectual matter is a cause for intellectual pleasure - is false.
There is a sense that such practitioners are considered somewhat dilettante to this avowedly 'working-class theologian'.
He pursued 'a dilettante interest' in the matter for some time but a definite opportunity arose in 1896.
Here, his interventions were frequent - at daily conferences - and direct, though his dilettante, arbitrary and intransigent interference was often disastrously counter-productive.
Marsh was not a musician by profession but trained as a lawyer and for his entire life considered himself no more than a musical dilettante.
In other words, the intellectual exclusivity and associated creativity which underpinned the world of the public intellectual has been paradoxically replaced by a dilettante and moribund intellectual culture.
