Linguistician

I keep seeing this word in the book I'm reading, Small World by David Lodge. He never uses linguist, only linguistician. I thought it was a made-up word that was supposed to be pejorative, as he's a very ironic author, but I just found out it does exist and means linguist followed by the number 2, as Merriam Webster puts is, which is someone who works with linguistics. Maybe David Lodge differentiates a linguistician from a linguist, as the latter can also mean someone who speaks many languages (I don't like this usage, though, even though it is in the dictonary, I prefer the terms polyglot and multilingual, alongside colloquial equivalents).