This will undoubtedly bore some and most will say “so what?” but I thought it an interesting bit of semantics.

The English, French and German names for CON are conjurer, élémentaliste and druide respectively.

When I think of the term conjurer nothing in particular comes to mind having to do with the elements or mastery of them. What does come to mind is someone who conjures things... like spirits perhaps. Some sort of magically inclined person sure, but not a master of elements.

In French however once we’ve literally translated it into English as Elementalist, it suddenly and more clearly imparts on the reader what exactly it is that class does or might do. Granted Elementalist is barely a word if at all in the strict sense of the good old Oxford dictionary but I think it does a much better job of conveying to people what the job may do.

Even the German word which translates literally as druid is more telling of what you might expect. If you’ve ever played WoW or some other game where druids are forest hued plant loving nature enthusiasts then your perception might be skewed a little bit and again you might not get what you were expecting if they had called it a druid but at least the tie in with nature (and by extension the elements) is still there. And perhaps druid is more apt in any event since the conjurers’ guild is an order of people who worship powerful nature spirits of some sort (differently named) and some elites among them can commune with those spirits or entities, all set most conveniently in a forest. That, in a loose sense, is kind of a reflection of the term druid.

Conjurer however is the farthest of the three terms from what one might think the class is labelled when what it does is described to you before what it’s called.

Do I have a conclusion? Not really. Just a thought.

As an aside to this aside thaumaturge also seems better named on French as, translated literally, Occultist. Again a slightly more telling term than using a word that basically means sorcerer.