This bit of jargon began showing up in fly fishing literature in the 1980s. It meant you had to get the technical details right in order to catch what were invariably described as "highly selective trout". That meant getting a very small fly that matched whatever the trout were eating at that precise moment in colour, shape and type and that this fly had to be fished on the end of a very fine tippet of a very long leader (the tippet being the last section of said leader).
This technical talk isn't all crazy but it sure tended in that way and did so pretty quickly. It is ludicrous, for example, to speak of highly selective trout. Trout don't select so much as respond to stimulation given that they do not have a complex enough nervous system to do anything you could reasonably call selecting. That said, I used to believe it once. I once took my father on a trip to a tailrace fishery where the fishing was supposedly "technical". He wasn't having any of it and spent the day bashing the water with a big wet attractor fly and catching lots of fish.
This technical talk also lends itself to some of the worst kind of macho posturing. There is a bit in a Thomas McGuane novel where he talks about casting into the wind with flies so small you couldn't see them attached to gossamer fine triplets on the end of fantasy-length leaders.
But technical became the word. I heard it creep into the jogging world a decade later when people started talking about "technical" clothing. It also appeared in sailing. Note that these sports are associated with a certain level of wealth and culture. I suppose it is an inevitable product of so many guys in high tech industries making a fair chunk of money and playing a bigger and bigger role in higher culture and politics.
Just the other day, though, I was reading a guy talking about "technical wading". All he meant by the word was that the current was strong and the rocks were slippery. And I thought, the word has now lost any sense at all along with the technocratic culture that produced it.
This technical talk isn't all crazy but it sure tended in that way and did so pretty quickly. It is ludicrous, for example, to speak of highly selective trout. Trout don't select so much as respond to stimulation given that they do not have a complex enough nervous system to do anything you could reasonably call selecting. That said, I used to believe it once. I once took my father on a trip to a tailrace fishery where the fishing was supposedly "technical". He wasn't having any of it and spent the day bashing the water with a big wet attractor fly and catching lots of fish.
This technical talk also lends itself to some of the worst kind of macho posturing. There is a bit in a Thomas McGuane novel where he talks about casting into the wind with flies so small you couldn't see them attached to gossamer fine triplets on the end of fantasy-length leaders.
But technical became the word. I heard it creep into the jogging world a decade later when people started talking about "technical" clothing. It also appeared in sailing. Note that these sports are associated with a certain level of wealth and culture. I suppose it is an inevitable product of so many guys in high tech industries making a fair chunk of money and playing a bigger and bigger role in higher culture and politics.
Just the other day, though, I was reading a guy talking about "technical wading". All he meant by the word was that the current was strong and the rocks were slippery. And I thought, the word has now lost any sense at all along with the technocratic culture that produced it.
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