If you, like me, are new to fly fishing, there are a few words that are crucial to your understanding of the sport. In fact, there appear to be anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand of these words. And that’s simply for trout fishing in fresh-water rivers. These words don’t simply fall under the subject matter of “fishing.” No, we have words dealing with gear, hydrology, ichthyology, and with insect life both real and fake. Yes, we have a whole etymology of entomology.
I work in digital media and marketing for a living, a field that loves to invent new words, bastardize old words, verb nouns, and visit a host of other sins on the language. But most of the words are as meaningless as the field. Misunderstanding a digital marketing word won’t get you killed. Hell, it won’t even get you laughed at because if you misuse one, chances are other people in the room either didn’t know what it meant in the first place or just assume the meaning has changed in the last half hour.
But even if fly fishing seems overly complicated and ludicrous at times, the words fly fishers use actually mean something. You can find glossaries and text books and websites elsewhere, from the basic to the not-so-basic. I’ll leave it to the experts to give you the latin name of the Caddis fly, what its larval stage is called, and the approximately six million fly patterns based on it. I’m not even going to delve into the differences between the trout species.
I’m new to all of this, so I can’t very well make you an expert if I’m still an idiot bumbling around in waders with the tags still on them. So I’ll give you a few key vocabulary words defined by my own experience and designed to give you just enough knowledge to start looking elsewhere before getting yourself seriously hurt.
Continue reading “A completely ridiculous glossary of fly fishing: Part 1”
KEN WHEATON 