Back when I was around 17, I heard the word “Pundit” for the first time. It struck me as a funny sounding somewhat foreign word. I asked its meaning and was told ” a wise man”. The dictionary I had at the time (Funk and Wagnalls Unabridged 1959) gave the definition “Learned Hindu, especially one versed in Sanskrit lore”. It comes from the Hindi payndit “a learned man, master, teacher” and further from the Sanskrit payndita “a learned man, scholar”.
That definition is followed in modern dictionaries with the following:
“A person who makes comments or judgments, especially in an authoritative manner, critic or commentator”
And I often now hear the term used to describe the manifold talking heads that appear on television and radio espousing their political opinions. This my friends I find immensely irritating. I am embarrassed for us as a civilization that we have not risen up in a wave of collective nausea at this.
We have taken a word that for hundreds of years described an honorable sage and bastardised it to where it now is attributed to boneheaded political idealogues and hacks, commentators of questionable intellect and motivation, and loudmouth knuckleheads who’s only talent seems to be the ability to obtain the soapbox from which they pontificate to an equally questionable audience.
There was a time when the difference between a knowledgable judge and a bombastic critic was clear. Sadly we have devolved as a culture to the point where we can no longer separate the two and we raise the value of the critic and lower the value of the judge because of it.
If we fail to demand an accounting of these folks we are dooming ourselves to losing the wise men and women who’s efforts and education are in some way wasted when they are so inequitably valued, and gaining only more bombastic commentators who seek the elevation in status but are unwilling or as likely unable to gain the knowledge necessary to fill the original definition of the word Pundit.
