(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

[jenaflynn.livejournal.com]

Depends on the situation:

"What's transgendered mean?"
That leads to this whole spiel where I try to instill politically correct progressive values, while potentially being on the look out for sudden negative or painful reactions.

"What's Unix?"
I usually just lie and say it's on big mainframe computers that are the sizes of buses. That excuses me from fixing their copy of windows.