I have been listening to some rants on YouTube against people learning a bunch of languages calling themselves "linguists".

I'm personally interested in both linguistics and languages as a hobby but I have no official training and certainly no qualifications in either.

My instinct was that the ranter was kind of right in his opinion that people who speak many languages are not linguists. But I was uncomfortable with his opinion that you had to have certain pieces of paper to be called a linguist, I think "post doctorate" from memory.

So I looked up "linguist" in some imperfect online dictionaries and was surprised to find both senses. Here's the defs from oxforddictionaries.com (chosen at random):


  
  A person skilled in foreign languages.
  A person who studies linguistics.
  


Now I don't have access to a better dictionary on historical principles from my current location.

I would like to know which of these senses is the original one?

My original opinion was the latter sense but on thinking about it I now expect it to be the former. I doubt the word would be a back-formation from "linguistics".

As a side question, would the first sense now be considered to be colloquial or at least nontechnical or outdated?


Question: Does Spider-Man shoot spider silk?
Answer: The Marvel Wiki entry on Spider-Man's Web-Shooters says this about the web fluid:


  The web fluid is a shear-thinning liquid (virtually solid until a shearing force is applied to it, rendering it fluid) whose exact formula is as yet unknown, but is related to nylon. On contact with air, the long-chain polymer knits and forms an extremely tough, flexible fiber with extraordinary adhesive properties. The web fluid's adhesive quality diminishes rapidly with exposure to air. (Where it does not make contact with air, such as the attachment disk of the web-shooter, it remains very adhesive.) After about one to two hours, certain imbibed esters cause the solid form of the web fluid to dissolve into a powder. Because the fluid almost instantly sublimates from solid to liquid when under shear pressure, and is not adhesive in its anaerobic liquid/solid phase transition point, there is no clogging of the web-shooter's parts.


The Marvel Directory entry on Spider-Man says that Peter Parker intended to imitate spider's silk.


  Parker used equipment borrowed from his high school to fabricate a fluid that imitated a spider's silk web, and spinneret devices to project that fluid from his wrists in the form of a web strand.