(no subject)

[tahnan]

There's a question that linguists get all the time after they tell someone they're a linguist, which is, "How many languages do you speak?" It's an intensely frustrating question, because it misses much of the point of the work a linguist does.

Similarly, I know that friends who have masters' degrees in children's literature dread questions about whether that means that they're writing a children's book. (Also, nearly any question that mentions Harry Potter.)

So I ask my readers, out of curiosity. When you tell people something fundamental about who you are or what you do ("I'm a linguist"; "I have a Masters' in Children's Literature"; "I'm from Serbia"; "I have a wooden leg"; "I brew beer"; or what have you), what question is it that you dread getting in return, but which seems to be fairly inevitable?

Comments

[entropyspring.livejournal.com]

What I hate about being in biomedical research are the folks who ask me "so I saw this guy on insert-news-show-here who was working on curing cancer" -- as if the scientific community keeps tabs on who's been on TV lately -- and then follows up with "do you know him?" as if everyone who works on cancer research knows each other or "what's your opinion of that?" as if I can glean enough information from what they remember of the TV show to have a scientific opinion.

My usual response is "oh, that sounds interesting...it's not exactly in my field, so I don't know much about it."

Or the people who hear that I'm a Biomedical Engineer and actually ask me for health care advice.

But those are the good responses. The usual response is "wow..." followed by dead silence.