lmao I think your first mistake was going on Reddit, especially in a computer science-adjacent topic area.
I'm getting curmudgeonly (my degree and I are celebrating our 10th anniversary next spring) and there are entire classes of people with whom I would rather eat a rusty nail than tell that I studied linguistics. Besides the "so how many languages" and "lol speech pathology" crowd, I've discovered a category of people who will react to this revelation with widened, glistening Disney eyes and the breathless exclamation that they "love language". They're almost universally interested in boring shit like historical/socioling, or orthography nonsense, or semiotics/pragmatics with no foundation in morphosyntax, or lexicography (okay lexicography is okay, I thought about becoming a lexicographer for 10 minutes once), or "proper grammar rules" Strunk and White garbage, or even more tangential stuff that's really for English and other social science majors, and I wind up with the same wooden smile on my face as if they asked how many languages I speak. Ghhhhhh.
I was a syntactician and liked my applied linguistics in the manner of first and second language acquisition. Nobody ever tries to start a conversation with me about THAT. :/
I went and saw Arrival with a friend and basically MST3K'd the whole thing after he attempted to tell me it was reputed to have actual research in it, and I swore up and down that I was gonna write a This Is What Linguistics Actually Is primer slideshow because I was tired of it. I mean, I still haven't, but it probably does need to exist.
my online ling engagement basically starts and ends at Speculative Grammarian
Date: 2017-08-01 01:13 am (UTC)I'm getting curmudgeonly (my degree and I are celebrating our 10th anniversary next spring) and there are entire classes of people with whom I would rather eat a rusty nail than tell that I studied linguistics. Besides the "so how many languages" and "lol speech pathology" crowd, I've discovered a category of people who will react to this revelation with widened, glistening Disney eyes and the breathless exclamation that they "love language". They're almost universally interested in boring shit like historical/socioling, or orthography nonsense, or semiotics/pragmatics with no foundation in morphosyntax, or lexicography (okay lexicography is okay, I thought about becoming a lexicographer for 10 minutes once), or "proper grammar rules" Strunk and White garbage, or even more tangential stuff that's really for English and other social science majors, and I wind up with the same wooden smile on my face as if they asked how many languages I speak. Ghhhhhh.
I was a syntactician and liked my applied linguistics in the manner of first and second language acquisition. Nobody ever tries to start a conversation with me about THAT. :/
I went and saw Arrival with a friend and basically MST3K'd the whole thing after he attempted to tell me it was reputed to have actual research in it, and I swore up and down that I was gonna write a This Is What Linguistics Actually Is primer slideshow because I was tired of it. I mean, I still haven't, but it probably does need to exist.