The term acrobat comes from the Italian montembanco, meaning someone who stands on a bench. An acrobat is a traveling salesman, while a quack sells bogus medicines through deception. A charlatan uses flamboyant shows to deceive for monetary gain. The quintessential acrobat uses exclusivity and exoticism to attract customers. The term quack carries a negative connotation, while charlatan is subjective. Skeptics may describe anyone who claims to have access or a solution they don’t trust as a quack.
The term acrobat comes from the Italian montembanco, which refers to someone who stands up on a bench. Simply put, an acrobat is a traveling salesman, especially of bogus medicines. In closest association with its Italian derivative montembanco, the term quack refers to someone who sells bogus or quack medicines by standing on a pedestal or platform to address and entice an audience of potential buyers of quack medicines.
A quack is someone who sells by deception, who deceives a customer into buying a good. While the term originally refers to someone who sells dubious drugs, it can also more generally refer to anyone who uses the show to attract buyers. A charlatan could be anyone who participates in a flamboyant show, deception, or sham to gain an advantage, especially a monetary advantage.
Other synonymous names for such a person include quack and crook. More specifically, a quack is a presumptuous claimant of knowledge or skill. In the same sense, a charlatan is someone whose means of deceiving the customer usually involves alleged knowledge, false knowledge that the prospective buyer presumably does not share.
It should be understood that, according to the original indication, an acrobat does not impose his wares on a buyer. Nor does it generally trick a buyer into buying something by way of a grand and elaborate scheme. Rather, a quack plays on people’s wishes to ascertain the mysterious. An acrobat takes advantage of someone’s desire to know what few others know, and thus become part of the few.
The quintessential acrobat uses exclusivity and exoticism to attract his customers and make them want what he sells. In this sense, the term quack can be applied to anyone who dupes a customer by feigning access to the inaccessible and offering that access to the average person for a price. Within this connotation, one might consider PDA readers, psychics, tarot card readers, and spiritual communicators to be sort of charlatans.
This is, of course, a view that would be held by a skeptic of what these folks claim to be offering their customers. The term quack carries a negative connotation and specifically refers to someone whose goods and services are unreliable and manufactured. Charlatan is a subjective term, a term that applies a qualitative judgment. A skeptic might, therefore, describe anyone who claims to have access, appropriate treatment, or a solution that the skeptic doesn’t trust, as a quack.
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