According to one James Agate “a professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn’t feel like it. An amateur is a man who can’t do his job when he does feel like it.”

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Our sense of the word amateur is that while professionals are good at what they do, amateurs are simply hacks.

The histories of these words tell a slightly different tale. 

Professional is by far the older of the two words, its roots appearing as profession from Latin a century before Chaucer’s time.

Amateur didn’t show up until shortly after the United States achieved independence.

According The Oxford English Dictionary the first English meaning of “profession” was one that we would still recognise. People entering into a religious order would pledge their vows—or make a public profession or their faith—in order to be accepted.

From the Latin, profess still has the same meaning for us that it did back then; you know what I meant when I say “I don’t profess to know.”

University teachers are called professors from the same root; they have “something to say” to us.

So in an etymological sense, a professional is someone with something to say on the subject at hand.

The first people to be called amateurs were not necessarily being insulted.  The word comes from the French word for “love,” aime.

So that an amateur is someone who loves the subject at hand.

It was a fairly logical progression then for someone who loves something like bird watching, to spend a lot of time at it, so that the subsequent meaning of amateur became something like “hobbyist”—a meaning we still sometimes use.

Yet there is still a difference between spending a few weekends and evenings at stamp collecting and making a living by trading in antique philatelics.  Thus the third meaning of amateur as a contrast to professional, someone who may think they have something to profess, but in their case, love just isn’t enough.