Thursday, January 10, 2008

Pundits Anyone?

For reasons too complicated to go into I had reason to look up the word pundit. Did you know there were pundits in the late 17th century? It's a Sanskrit word dating from that time meaning, 'learned'. It came into popular use in the early 19th century as 'learned expert'.

Now as we all know, if you take the x out of expert what do you have? A drip under pressure....

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think 'pandit' is the original word, however I prefer the word 'tosh' in your previous posting. It isn't Onomatopoeic but with the right amount of resonance it gets the point over beautifully.

Ellee Seymour said...

If you separate "pun" and "dit", does that add anything to this discussion?
I like learning about word origins too.

Anonymous said...

It's an acronym (SLA) Proffer Utter Nonsense Deny Ignorance Totally. Hmmmmm.

r morris said...

I thought it was that little dangly thingy in the back of your throat.

Richard Havers said...

Better than the dangly thing in the rear window of your car Rob :)

Ellee when you separate them like that it looks really odd. I want to start singing.

"Pun Dit, Pun Dit, just a little bit." a la Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. Now that really does date me.