A puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a pundit

There are only about 200 words in the English language borrowed directly from Sanskrit, including three of my favorites: pajamas, ganja and loot. All of them still mean just what they meant during the Sepoy Mutiny, except one: pundit. Once upon a time a pundit was someone like H.L. Mencken or William F. Buckley, a public intellectual known for pithy, clever observations. Mark Twain said "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." Winston Churchill described Clement Atlee as "A humble man with a lot to be humble about." And Fred Allen observed that "Ed Sullivan will be around as long as somebody else has talent."

Unfortunately thanks to the ubiquity of cable TV panel shows, "pundit" is no longer an accolade bestowed by an admiring public, but a job one applies for, usually without any credentials. The recently departed Kimberly Guilfoyle parlayed lingerie modeling with second-chairing a dog mauling trial into a stint on Fox News, where she'd flash her shapely gams at the end of the table opposite Greg Gutfeld, who comes across like that guy in the dorms who used to memorize Playboy's party jokes.

This could be dismissed as another unfortunate circumstance of modern times but for the continuous assaults on language and critical thinking that masquerade as profundities. Anyone who passed a freshman logic course knows that just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, "Begging the question" has nothing to do with begging or with questions. Question begging is repeating a premise as if it is a conclusion, like "He must be overweight because he's fat." But that lesson was lost on Holy Cross grad Chris Matthews, who butchers the phrase on average once a night. At 7 p.m. eastern Jesuits by the score cringe in chagrin. "At the end of the day" is another overused ersatz profundity that serves as a sort of mental Pinter pause for the not-so-glib. John Maynard Keynes observed that "in the long run we are all dead." At the end of the day I have a glass of milk and fall asleep. "That's just semantics" is a refuge for those who think Abe Lincoln would have served the cause of clarity had he just started his address in Gettysburg with the words "Eighty-seven years ago..."

No one should be more alarmed by this scary development than those who practice the profession of law. Everyone who has ever been at a family reunion knows that pronouncements on matters legal by persons with no idea what they are talking about are as common as "Happy Birthday to You." But the pundit parade is making things worse. Here are a few morsels that stick between my teeth:

1. If there actually is such thing as "The Court of Public Opinion" it more closely resembles a lynch mob than it does an actual court. It has no rules, it has no laws, and at least three of your 12 jurors are likely to believe Neil and Buzz never walked on the moon.

2. Users of "That's been debunked" merit a dictionary in their Christmas stocking. A proposition is debunked when it is proved factually wrong or is ripped to logical shreds, not when it is dissed on Twitter.

3. "Due Process" is another beauty. The self-appointed roaring geniuses all think that due process is some sort of hard and fast set of rules that must be applied when an athlete gets caught giving an obnoxious fan the finger or a teacher gets caught mooning. It isn't. The phrase is deliberately vague, so much so that Justice William Rehnquist described it as "whatever process is due."

4. "That's already been litigated" is another one that makes this old trial guy seethe. Nowadays, even lawsuits aren't litigated. Less than 2 personal of civil suits filed in federal court ever make it to trial. When a lawyer refers to himself as a "litigator," he or she is unwittingly admitting that they take depositions and then settle. In real litigation there is an ending. Somebody wins and somebody loses. World War II was litigated. Korea wasn't.

5. "Some un-elected Judge." Usually used when a jurist reaches a conclusion the pundit doesn't understand (between them, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck have made it through five semesters of college), this phrase discounts the fitness of someone nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and paints him as some sort of functionary, like the guy who tears your ticket at the movies. It is almost too obvious, but it screams to be pointed out that TV pundits aren't elected either.

6. "A technicality." This fallback doesn't just apply to the under-educated, it also embraces the intellectually lazy. The Fifth Amendment, a statute of limitations, or losing because you didn't show up aren't technicalities. If they are, then so is "open other end."

Anyone applying for a wisdom-spinning permit should also pass a test demonstrating that they understand that indictments are not proof. It is particularly galling when this tiny detail is ignored by the army of retired FBI agents and former prosecutors strutting and fretting their hour in the age of Trump. People do get acquitted, like John Edwards, Michael Jackson, and O.J. (oops). And somebody please put an end to the practice of ripping and reading prosecutorial press releases intoning that if the defendant is convicted on all counts he faces 862 years in prison. Fake News!

The upshot of all this legal misinformation is that even that portion of the public that cares to keep up with the news is as ignorant as ever of the relatively simple stuff we do for a living, thus enabling us to charge large for knowing relatively little. At the end of the day I guess that's not so bad.