Memo to TV newspeople: There is no such word as "pundint." If you want to be one, it's incumbent upon you to learn to friggin' pronounce it correctly.

I'll cut you just the tiniest bit of slack because that -dit ending is an unusual one for English words, and besides, hardly any of you have a good command of English anyway. "Pundit," according to Webster's, comes from the Sanskrit pandita, meaning "learned," via the Hindi pandit. About the only other English words ending in -dit that I can think of off the top of my head are "bandit," which comes from Italian, and "plaudit," which comes from Latin. But then again, I'm not coming up with any English words just now that end in -dint, which makes the "pundint" pronunciation even more puzzling. (And though it's been almost 20 years since I formally studied linguistics, so I might have forgotten a thing or twelve, I still don't think there's an rule that stipulates #it --> #int.)

The mispronunciation of "pundit" by the self-proclaimed pundits wasn't what depressed me most about the debate, though. The most depressing thing about the debate was, of course, getting another reminder that the Unelected Leader of the Free World is somewhere on the evolutionary scale between a chimp and Alfred E. Newman, with his ability to speak extemporaneously falling somewhere closer to the former than the latter. (Okay, that's not fair. I apologize to chimpanzees for the preceding statement.)

And by far the most depressing thing I saw after the debate was on CNN, which my husband had on (we had another TV tuned to PBS and the third one on CBS). I'm not sure whether the woman was one of CNN's "metered voters," or a pundit-to-be, or what, but she said (this is a paraphrase, but a close one) that she thought Kerry seemed like he was from New England, and was very intellectual, whereas Bush spoke more like a regular person and was clearly a "true American." I've heard the TV news types put forth this view as supposedly representative of the thinking of average Americans (whoever they may be), but to hear someone actually espouse it as their own opinion utterly horrified me. I'd like to find out who the woman was so that I can send her to Portland, Maine, or Torrington, Connecticut, or Gloucester, Massachusetts, or Concord, New Hampshire. I'd have her walk into a bar or a church or a grocery store in any of those towns and tell the people there that they're not true Americans.