Akademik

n.

A person, particularly one with little or no talent, who is briefly famous.

A celetoid is only allowed so much time in the spotlight. Of course, just when you think your life as a celetoid has passed, you end up writing an article about your experience six years later, or you sing a song for a friend at a wedding.

—Richie Wilcox, " My Life as a Celetoid: Reflections on Canadian Idol: http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/u78084281v490246/fulltext.pdf" (PDF), Canadian Theatre Review, January 29, 2010

The advent of reality television has created a subdivision in the halls of fame where ordinary people, innocent of any performance skills or without any particular achievement, may acquire celebrity of a fleeting kind. But such "celetoids" must be distinguished from celebrities proper who make a career out of performing themselves.

—Barry King, " Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_velvet_light_trap/v065/65.king.html," The Velvet Light Trap, March 22, 2010

I propose celetoid as the term for any form of compressed, concentrated, attributed celebrity. I distinguish celetoids from celebrities because, generally, the latter enjoy a more durable career with the public. ...

Examples include lottery winners, one-hit wonders, stalkers, whistle-blowers, sports' arena streakers, have-a-go-heroes, mistresses of public figures and the various other social types who command media attention one day, and are forgotten the next.

—Chris Rojek, Celebrity: http://books.google.com/books?id=jJ0QdF0WSIwC&pg=PA20&dq=celetoid, Reaktion Books, September 21, 2001

The etymology of this term is obscure, and the coiner, the sociologist Chris Rojek, doesn't explain its derivation. My guess is that it combines the word celebrity with the suffix -oid, meaning "having the form of; resembling," with the extra t tossed in for pronounceability and to echo existing words such as factoid and planetoid.

-toid is diminutive too I think, so it's also a little condescending.Kurt: Agreed.