I hereby proclaim myself a neologician. If you're not familiar with the word neologician, you've got lots of company: only neologicans know--or care--what neologician means. For the record, a neologician is someone who invents a new word.

My new word is punditto.

You already know what a pundit is. It's an expert to whom people turn for advice and commentary. A punditto, on the other hand, pretends to be a pundit but only repeats what other people tell him/her to say. Pundits do original thinking and offer genuine insights. Pundittos could be replaced with a Xerox machine.

The Punditto Army

Television is full of pundittos, mostly on cable news. Talk radio has even more of them, and the newspapers have their share, too. My local paper, Oregonian, recently lost a prominent punditto. He wrote politically conservative op-ed pieces for about ten years. I read many of them, hoping to learn something or gain a new insight. But 99 percent his columns sounded like he was rewriting talking points that he got in his daily email from Karl Rove. So he posed as a pundit, but he was really just a punditto.

Political bosses love to have legions of pundittos at their beck and call. If all the so-called experts say the same thing, the reasoning goes, then the public will think, "Oh, it must be true because all the pundits say the same thing." In politics, this is called "being on message."

Conservative republicans are the masters of the punditto strategy. That's not to single them out for blame; democratic leaders long to be the puppet masters of their own punditto brigade, but they just can't manage it. (As Will Rogers famously said, "I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat.")

Fly Fishing Pundittos

Does the fly fishing world have pundittos? Boy howdy, you betcha!

Anyone who's written about fly fishing will tell you--if they're honest--that sometimes they're not sure about a tactic, a fine point of entomology, etc., so they simply repeat what they've heard or read somewhere else. Conformance to facts and experience are irrelevant. It's better to be wrong but in good company, than to be right and alone!

Fly fishing has very few true pundits. After all, people have been doing this for a long time. Tackle technology has steadily evolved, and the fish are a little different due to heavy pressure and a changing environment. But basically, we're just chasing the same pea-brained salmonids with a long rod, like our predecessors have done for centuries. So there's not that much new to say.

Fly fishing pundittos have their place, and every now and then one of them says something original. But mostly they just remind us of things that Charles Cotton and Isaac Walton knew when they cast their flies on Derbyshire's River Dove in the mid-1600s.

The problem is not that we have pundittos. The problem is that so few of them realize that's what they are. A lot of angling writers take themselves way too seriously. That's why my favorite fly fishing writers have a firm grasp of history and a secure knowledge of who they are--and what they aren't.

Ooo, excellent new word for my lexicon of sound bytes.

Thank you Uncle Fuzzy!

I totally embrace your new word, Scott! Punditto is a lot nicer word than "BS artist."

But perhaps you have actually invented two new words...

I can find "neologism," on the net, but not neologician, although the word form seems logical. (I'm too lazy to pull my Compact Edition of the Oxford Dictionary or my Random House Unabridged down from the top shelf.) Search for it on the net...you'll see what I mean.

Ironically enough, Webster's Collegiate, my go-to dictionary, has a secondary meaning for neologism. Look it up!

Ups on "punditto!"

Hugh

The word neologician is implicit in the continued use of combining forms in English, all the combining forms are in there, so unless it is widely used in a particular form they just list the components of such words.

I will have to see what my unabridged Websters from 2001 says.
Great article, and the new meme rings very nicely. Thanks!

Better watch it Hugh, that kind of remark could get you kicked off of Westfly.

Tim

Actually, "neologist" is a more accepted term for someone who coins new words. But "neologician" seems to imply more accuracy. Of course, since neologician is not exactly accepted, then using "neologician" makes one a "neologist".

My head hurts.