Here's a clever site by David R. MacIver that compiles stereotypical responses to the "What did you study" question. two responses so far for linguistics. I'm sure we can add many more.
What do people say to Linguistics?
"Oh, my grammar is horrible. You must hate that..."
"So how many languages do you speak?"
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8 comments:
The one I usually get is "So what are you going to do with that?"
I still don't have an answer.
hehe, it's a tough one.
I usually get pretty good questions. People will ask about different dialects often. On the "what will you do with it?" question, it doesn't happen as much when you're talking to other academics/researchers.
Coffee..., so true that within academics, people are more attuned to what linguists do. But once outside, they all think we're junior high school English teachers, hehe.
Any votes for "Isn't The Language Instinct" a great book?"?
That usually gets me frothing at the mouth...
haha, or "Isn't Strunk & White" just the greatest!
So, not having read the book, I'm curious why it makes you froth? Is it that bad?
I majored in English, which is another "So what are you going to do with that?" major.
I can't speak for Szwagier, but Pinker promotes a particular view of language in the book, namely Chomskyan, which many linguists today would consider innacurate. Nonetheless, Pinker was an excellent psycholinguist back-in-the-day.
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