istic.

The fairly frequently heard "hellenistic" turns out to derive from the less familiar to my ears "hellenist", in the sense of someone who speaks Greek, not (like an orientalist) a student of the Hellenes, though "hellenist" itself apparently comes from the Greek 'Eλληνιστης (with an accent on that final eta) and does not seem to be directly associated with the primary meaning I attach to "hellenistic" (def'n 2 in the OED), according to which it contrasts with "hellenic" and is—or at least is as I learned it—associated with a Decline in Greatness and general Retrospective Tendencies romanticizing the lately departed culture—though I suppose the increase in hellenists from foreign parts probably played a causal role. We can lay it all at the feet of Alexander and Cavafy's philhellenes (different translation).

This being the derivation of the word if not, directly, the primary meaning, I may have to prescind from a claim that I wanted to make, namely, that there are some words in -ic that have forms in -istic but not in -ist. I didn't even know about "hellenist" until it occurred to me, yesterday, that I ought to check; I was prompted in part to do so by the discovery that in the cases of the other words that I thought exhibited this pattern, the -istic forms were actually neologisms that just seemed completely natural and transparent to me. (There is even static/statist/statistic, though here the three words have completely dissimilar meanings, which is not to say that their origins are likewise dissimilar.) Perhaps "neologism" isn't right either; each of them (only two!) is attested on the web, just not in dictionaries, and I probably (well, definitely) encountered one of them, "authentistic", this summer, in Taruskin's Text and Act, about which a brief digression:

First, given that he brands the school he opposes that of authenticism, and its practitioners authenticists, one might have thought that his preferred adjective to describe their performances would be "authenticistic", which speaks fairly fluidly, even if it's ungainly on the page. I would have preferred it if he did, actually, since authenticists have are working with the concept of authenticity in a different register from that in which I find "authentistic" most congenial and it would be nice to have different words corresponding to the different uses. But no matter. The more interesting thing is this: Taruskin clearly takes his attacks on the authenticists, which as far as I can tell—it's certainly not my area—seem good, also to be attacks on authenticity in musical performance as an ideal tout court; thus his invocation in the introduction to T&A of "the tainted A-word", whose taint (the association being, given the phrase, irresistible) he is proud to have applied. But most of the actual criticisms he brings against authenticism seem to boil down, not to the demonstration of the perniciousness or uselessness or unachievability of authentic performance practice as an ideal, but to the pointing out of the fact that the authenticist performers and theorizers are going about it all wrong, are, basically, not really being authentic to the music they're performing. Werktreue is the wrong ideal to apply to these pieces, or, rather, being true to the work involves much more than being "true", mechanically, to the work as written, because much more than is in the score (and the score-selection methodology comes in for no small criticism as well) would be part of the performance, and so the authentistic performers are really expressing the modernist ethos of Stravinsky, and being authentic to it, and (here's the judo flip that isn't quite believable, given the demolition that generally surrounds it) that authenticity is all to the good! There's also the subsidiary point that the authenticists often fail even to live up to their stated goals (the one Stravinsky recording review, with its catalogue of various tempi, is a good example of this), but the overarching theme of his criticism does seem to be that the performers who arrogated the term "authentic" for themselves were blinkered from the outset and were unable to see what authentic performance of the pieces in question, given the whole state of our knowledge and going beyond the fetishization of dots on paper, might actually come to. The posture of being beyond thinking authenticity in performance is possible, where that "authenticity" has reference to anything beyond current expectations, seems especially hard to reconcile with the scattered mentions and single review of Robert Levin's Mozart performances in the book. The argument that we wouldn't want to hear performances like those given by ensembles as badly rehearsed and even schooled as those that premiered Beethoven and Tchaikovsky are, I think, not very strong on their own.

Anyway, I'm more than happy, given the ease with which "authentistic", "poetistic" (the other one) and "hellenistic" are understood with primary reference to "authentic", etc, rather than "authentist", etc, to reanalyze them with "istic" being a morpheme in its own right (though not one that occurs wherever the string "istic" does; obviously the "istic" of "realistic" is not our "istic"), and to explain the meaning with such that it has to do with the impressionistic (ironic, given that "impressionistic" has a perfectly good correspondent in -ist). Consider how Pippin begins "On Maisie's Knowing Her Own Mind":

The goal seems to evaporate once pursued, however devoutly wished the goal.

I mean possible responses to imperatives like “Be yourself,” Be sincere,” “Be authentic,” “Be more self-knowing,” “Don’t be so self-conscious,” “Do whatever you do wholeheartedly,” “Don’t be self-deceived.” When being yourself becomes the object of a pursuit, it becomes inevitably “theatrical,” playing the role of what you think a sincere you would be, rather than simply being one. Being authentic is simply a mode of being in the world; it becomes “what being authentic should look like” when pursued.

(One can imagine an exchange based around this insight: A: In my opinion you should abandon talk of authenticity and the like. It never really gets you anywhere you want to go; instead you wind up doing what you think it will take to get acknowledged as authentic, the way teenagers wear red windbreakers or black leather jackets or whatever they do these days. My advice is, forget all that crap and just be yourself. B: But—!.) Basically, what you end up with is what I want to call authentistic behavior, where that means just what Pippin says—playing the role of what you think a[n authentic] you would be, and that this is what the -istic indicates, that the istic thing has been mediated through someone's idea of what the isticless in general is or what counts thereas—hence impressionistic insofar as what results is an impression of something else rather than something in its own right. It helps that "impressionistic" has, for whatever reason, something of a negative connotation itself, as if it's usually applied to things that shouldn't be impressionistic but rather precise.

Similarly "poetistic" characterizes the gauzy, impressionistic (!) output of someone who has some idea of what poetry in general should be, but little guiding conception of what the poem directly being worked upon is. (Let's say. I'm sure everyone already knows what "poetistic" means.) Not all poetasters write poetistically, but many do.

("-aster" is of course an excellent suffix fallen on hard times; as far as I know it survives, to the extent it does at all, solely in "poetaster", "philosophaster", and "grammaticaster", though some think that "politicaster" could stand to come back as well. I can't think of what sort of -istic word that would actually sound good and do work we might construct from "grammaticaster", but "philosophistic" enjoys a worthy double parsing, capable of being construed as describing either those who love sophisms or those things written with the taste and colour of philosophy though not being philosophical.)

This simple meaning being given, we can see how to form a variety of useful and heretofore unseen words. "Realistic" as we know already exists and has a fine meaning of its own, but those who take a jaundiced view of everything, reflexively, convinced that in this misbegotten world everything is for the bad, and that in being as they are they're seeing things more accurately than we hoodwinked fools do, are realististic. (You will always be counted a realist if you say negative things.) Many recent movies, such as, they say, Dark Streets, have been noiristic. And so on and, no less, so forth.