We’re battling Tolkien’s connotations here, which the whole world has gobbled up. I am on board with Oren’s point about that being a job class. If someone’s ‘a wizard at something,’ like we’re praising them for their knowledge and skill and acumen.
There’s the study element of the spell casting, so there’s no innate ability. By clever, I mean rigorously intellectual. Wes: A wizard is just a skilled magic user who’s clever. Gandalf’s an angel.Ĭhris: Wes, again, what is your definition of a wizard? And by that definition, Gandalf’s not a wizard, which I will fight you on. That’s the useful working definition of a wizard. But I would argue that if we want the term to be useful and mean something- and I think this is how it typically gets used in fiction- it defines a magic user whose magic is academic they learn through books, they write spells down, they’ve researched spells, they go to wizard school, and that sort of thing. Oren: Technically we can call any kind of magic user any term if we want to. They’re all interchangeable because magic is not real. This is to say that we should have a definition of wizard that makes it useful in that it is different from others, because there’s all these different kinds of terms we can use for magic users and they’re all the same. Oren: I’m going to counter Wes a gandalficus centerus with my spell, which is usefulnus definitionus. You cannot get away from Gandalf when you say wizard. So those magical users who arrive precisely when they mean to, wear big hats, and have a great fondness for the halflings’ leaf, which is basically Gandalf. Wes: I want to state for the record that I would like us to have the foundation be: what the word most strongly connotes, for better or worse. Or is it? Maybe you both qualify as wizards by your definitions? By honing in on what I mean by that, I’m inviting Oren to get into a terminology war.Ĭhris: It’s like a wizards’ duel, but about wizards instead of by wizards. Yeah! Which is, I realized, an unhelpful catch-all word for magic users. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is… Wes: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
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