Ptolemy

By Deane Barker • •

Ptolemy was an ancient Greek scholar.

As an idiom or adjective, his name has become synonymous with wisdom or education. (I found an entire page explaining how to use “Ptolemy” in a sentence in different contexts.)

Why I Looked It Up

From The Good-Enough Life:

…historical experience has shown Hayek to be the Ptolemy of economics. He simply has got everything backwards.

…wait. This doesn’t imply wisdom at all.

Turns out that Ptolemy was one of the first people to propose that the Earth was the center of the solar system (geocentric), not the sun (heliocentric). He (and many others) famously got that one completely backwards (so, it’s not really fair, I don’t think, to call out Ptolemy specifically; he was in good company here).

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