On Rincewind

Rincewind, we are +told, is a wizard. On the Disc, wizarding is a profession; Pratchett based +them on the English academic system, with colleges and bursars and tenure. A +wizard is a man of some academic distinction, or a student of such a man; +career wizards are uniformly well-fed, of sound body (if not necessarily of +sound mind) reasonably dressed, opinionated, crankish, and - importantly - +capable of magic.

Rincewind is a wizard: he is not well fed, having spent his life being thrust +from one adventure to the next; his body is more attuned for running away +from things than it is for meandering the halls or sitting by a fire; his +opinions largely revolve around “is this new thing going to eat me,” rather +than more abstract matters; importantly, he is completely incapable of magic, +in spite of years of study.

Rincewind is a wizard, and the interesting thing about that is that the +reader is expected (and I certainly did) take both his and the narrator's +insistence on it at face value. Why shouldn't we?

I had a conversation with @aeletich a while +back, while she was teaching herself to program. I don't recall exactly what +prompted it, but at one point I told her to stop worrying about all the +better programmers out there: from everyone else's point of view, she was +already a wizard. There might be better wizards, and worse wizards, but she'd +already passed any sort of bright line delimiting “not a programmer” from +“programmer.”

I think self-identification is important, and overlooked.

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