Knee jerk responses

Responses to occupations

Linguists are a little-understood group. The following sample dialogue shows what I mean.

Usually at this point I launch into my canned response about how I don't speak anything but English with any real fluency, and how linguists study language rather than languages. This interchange happens maybe 19/20 times. There is even a song that some musically inclined linguists used to perform at conferences: "How many languages do you speak / I'm asked at least three times a week."

The other 1/20 time, the interlocutor will say something like "Well I had better watch what I say" as though linguists were language police. In fact, we are trained to observe what people actually do say rather than to prescribe what they ought to say.

One day I started wondering what reactions people in other professions get. I have taken to asking people with unusual occupations what knee jerk responses they get if they tell someone, say at a party, what they do. I'll keep adding them as I carry out my completely unscientific survey. (Note, "What's that?" probably doesn't distinguish one occupation from another so I won't include it below).

Linguist

How many languages do you speak?

Well I had better watch what I say then.

Mathematician

Math was always my favorite/best/worst subject at school.

Speech writer

Who for?

Responses to geography

New Zealand

The NZ Tourism and Publicity Dept must have done a carpet bombing of propaganda pamphlets sometime during the last generation. Nineteen times out of twenty, when people hear I am from New Zealand they say (verbatim) "I hear it's very beautiful there." I usually inform them that they heard right. The other 1/20 times, people tell me "I have always wanted to go there". A surprising number of people that I meet have actually been there.

USA

My friend Zev Handel, doing dialect field work in South China, got the same response over and over when he told people he was from the USA. They wanted to verify that when it is day time in their province it is night time in the USA. Zev confirmed this factoid, to their amazement.

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