Sue de Groot ponders how consultants went from advice-seekers to advice-givers This week I received an intriguing notice from someone who has, and I quote, "Re Invented" himself. It takes courage and panache to not only reinvent oneself but to Re Invent one rather hackneyed word into two bold new ones.I am not going to name the reinventor - or Re Inventor - in question, but his self-propelled metamorphosis was most impressive. No more, he announced, would he be an art dealer. Post-reinvention, he shall henceforth be known as an art consultant.story_article_left1Our dealer - sorry, consultant - went on to explain that this was not quite such a radical shift in identity as those agog at the news might imagine. He had, in fact, been a consultant for almost as many years as he had been a dealer, so the decision to change titles was really quite natural.If you think I am making fun of this esteemed person, you are wrong. "Consultant" is undoubtedly a more respectable word than "dealer". It is, for the time being, unbesmirched by any associations with packs of cards or illicit recreational chemicals - although this might change when Pablo Escobar's kin and those who shuffle at poker night catch on to this trend and start calling themselves drug consultants and card consultants.To prove I am not making fun of the former art dealer, let me state that in his case the use of the word "consultant" is entirely justified.The verb "consult" comes from the Latin consultare, "to take advice". I find it strange that there has never been a word for "to listen to advice and not take it", but there it is. In the early 1600s the noun "consultation" (a gathering of two or more for advisory purposes) fell into use."Consultant" invaded the English language about eight decades later. "Consultant" originally referred to a person who consulted oracles (fortune tellers to those who think oracle has something to do with information technology). In 1878, "consultant" began to be applied to doctors, which was an interesting switch from the one seeking advice to the one dispensing it.story_article_right2The first person to use "consultant" in a non-medical way was the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, in an 1893 short story starring the detective Sherlock Holmes. And thus the meaning of consultant spread into "one qualified to give professional advice".In this context, our former art dealer has earned the right to hang the word "consultant" on his door. He is an expert in his field (as opposed to agricultural consultants, who are experts in someone else's field) whose professional opinion saves clients from lapses in taste, errors in judgment and holes in pockets.Not all modern-day consultants have earned the right to the label, however. I have friends who are consultants (some even dispense good advice) and I hope none of these will be offended when I point out that in today's world "consultant" has become synonymous with "a magician who charges a (large) fee to perform an illusion whereby the person paying the fee believes he has profited".Consultants should not be downcast at this turn of events, however. They could always reinvent themselves as dealers...