Editing User:Andrej/TIGGER WARNING quotes

The Clueless: These are the people who simply cannot understand what linguistics is or how its methods work. However well-intentioned they might be, they can't really understand thoughtful answers to their questions and will never contribute much to the conversation beyond, "wow, languages are so complicated." Trying to educate them might make a linguist feel warm and fuzzy inside, but intellectually the endeavor is rather pointless.

The Precious: These are the polyglot-style narcissists, and more generally the people (mostly students) who are desperately seeking expertise in something, anything really as long as it's technical-sounding, and so latch onto linguistics because it impresses the scientifically uninitiated while remaining obscure enough within both the humanities and the sciences as to remain foreign to well-educated people who might challenge woo and junk science in other academic areas. These people very often fail to understand basic premises of scientific thought and inundate discussions with precious anecdotes about how they speak a certain way, or how they find some construction the professor (or redditor) has starred to be grammatical in language x, and so on. Their primary purpose is not to learn or contribute intellectually honest interest, but to feel special. Moreover, these people often fail to realize how transparent they are, and can be fairly aggressive.

The Chauvinists: These are the people who want to claim language for their "side" of the science|humanities line, so to speak, and tend to dismiss linguistics as a field altogether (or to a very large extent). There are the scientific chauvinists as well as the humanities chauvinists, and both are equally irritating in their own ways. The scientific chauvinist might goad you into arguments about animal communication and primates, while the humanities chauvinist might decide to wage a war on gendered grammar. Sometimes, they even use their naive understanding of areas that aren't their specialties (e.g. scientific type arguing from a humanities standpoint and vice versa) to argue about a field they didn't properly understand from the perspective of their own specialty. Little can be done with them.

The Misguided: These are by far the most hopeful group. Scientists, artistic types, and laymen who've simply been told things that aren't quite right about language (or who've bought into some form of romanticized linguistic woo) and will modify their stance in a reasonable fashion if shown why what they believe doesn't make sense. A lot of nat sci and cog sci people fall under this header.

The big problem is classifying a person based on very little data. Sometimes a pushy person who seems to fit the bill of an anti-linguistics chauvinist will turn out to be open to corrections. Sometimes a person who seems genuinely engaged will turn out to be an intellectually dishonest little snowflake. I can't speak from much experience myself, but I think it's reasonable to say that linguistics professors have to be some of the most harried academic scientists out there. Seeing them swallow their contempt while listening to some bullshitting student ramble on about how heforms his r's like Spanish speakers do, then just sort of smile and say that there's a lot of individual variation and that linguists work with what they see in most speakers is grating even in a second-hand way.