squidpants

so I enjoy reading magazines and such. For a long time I've thought the titles "contributing editor" and "guest editor" were strange. A guest editor sounds like somebody who walks in, corrects a few typos, then walks out. Bye! And a contributing editor does the same thing, or contrbutes a few changes. "Hi guys, change this word to this. Talk to you next week."

Obviously a guest editor is really just an editor for an issue or two, and does more thematic stuff rather than fixing typos, but that's what it sounds like to me. And after pondering the "contributing editor" term, I realized that the person contributes articles. And according to Wikipedia, they don't actually edit. So why not call them "contributing writer"? Then again, that's kind of redundant. How about "writer"? Or "correspondent," but that to me sounds like somebody who writes letters to the magazine. Oh well.