: a person who is highly knowledgeable about one subject but knows little about anything else
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the WebBut while there’s a veneer of innocence to these home movies—an air of the idiot savant’s capacity to unwittingly capture a glimpse of profundity—their most powerful valence is not one of innocence but of self-effacing knowledge. Leslie Jamison, The New York Review of Books, 29 Apr. 2020 On the one hand, this understanding of AI as an idiot savant is perfectly sensible. James Vincent, The Verge, 3 Oct. 2018 Similarly, Yang's character Jian Yang is portrayed as an idiot savant, a mostly silent character there for Erlich (T.J. Miller, who was fired from the show) to mock. Rebecca Farley, refinery29.com, 7 Mar. 2018