(no subject)

[jinian]

I just noticed that I've learned a valuable lesson in dealing with people since I was little. If someone asks you what a word means, don't look at them in astonishment, just try to explain.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Yeah... though I have to keep repeating the mantra: "100 is the average, not the minimum." :P

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I never had a big problem not staring in astonishment at stupid people. I accepted their existence from early on. It's the people who are otherwise clever and seem to know things, but then come out with a "what's sociology?" that give me trouble.

Law of averages

[kitsap_charles]

Exactly so.

You know how stupid the average person is? By definition, half of them are stupider than that.

Re: Law of averages

[(Anonymous)]

Now I quote this myself a lot, but we are both playing loose with statistics when we do so. 8->

100 may well be the average (although I remember reading with delicious horror that the USA average IQ had fallen below 100) - but it is not the median, which is what the "half are dumber than that" would require.

But anyway we slice it, there's a tremendous amount of dumbness out there. 8->

Australian Joe

Re: Law of averages

[kitsap_charles]

I forget who said it, but the sage once opined that there's a fixed amount of intelligence available, and since the population keeps increasing...

[torquemada.livejournal.com]

Restraining Fist of Death is also usually good.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

sometimes there's a reason tho, like a friend recently was like
'which flower is that?' when I said something about
the daffodils in the yard (and I jsut stupidly kept
saying 'you know, the daffodils' as if I had no other
way to describe them, like not even color or flutedness or
even just going outside and getting her one).

only later did I realize she had grown up in a totally different
climate than me and possibly never had someone really say THIS IS A DAFFODIL, like, sure they're some flower, but which one?

[torquemada.livejournal.com]

I grew up in a citified farm valley in California, where I attended the fine public schools. I know shit about what anything leafy of furry is. jinian knocked my socks off the other week while we were out walking by pointing stuff out and naming it for me.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I'm sure others will chime in to say that I tell them what plants are too. I'm just that way.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Obviously I should go on walks with you more often. :)

Me too.

[lirrin.livejournal.com]

Scientific names in particular amuse the hell out of me. When I was about 13, nothing was funnier than pointing to a Doug Fir and shrieking "pseudotsuga menziesii" to me and my best friend. (Your spelling may vary). I took a whole quarter of botany, and somehow all the genus names seem to have lodged themselves into a crack in my brain. I obsessively mumble them sometimes when I see the stupid plants. "Look, a brassicaceae. Oh do shut up."

Re: Me too.

[torquemada.livejournal.com]

No, I spell it 'friend', too. I'm the same way, which made biology a hoot - I still get my Barry White on when I say 'smooth endoplasmic reticulum'.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yes! I'm getting better about that too, listening to what people are actually asking me instead of like thinking I heard them wrong. It's probably annoying to have me ask, "Um. How much do you already know?" but it works better than "You mean you don't know that?"

adjusting the conversational level

[hattifattener]

Well, and it's important to keep the distinction between stupid and ignorant people. Ignorance is an easily curable condition.

I have the problem of trying to figure out ahead of time how much someone knows. If I start out at too simple a level, I'm likely to offend the person I'm talking with. (Plus waste a lot of time skipping up to the right level: "As you know, Bob, a square is a shape with four sides—" "I know that!" "OK. It turns out you can get the area of a square by multiplying—" "I know that too!" "Oh, right, good. Well, anyway, [insert actual conversation here]") You might think that starting out at too high a level and going down as necessary would be seen as an implicit compliment, but people are still embarrassed and offended by that. It's tricky, at least for an undersocialized geek like me. (And then there's the particularly awkward situation of trying to figure out whether someone isn't getting my argument because they don't know the background it's based on, or because they know so much more than I do that my argument is puzzlingly naïve.)

Obviously, the solution is to retreat to my mountain fastness and develop my schemes in isolation.

Re: adjusting the conversational level

[torquemada.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm, sweet sweet mountain fastnesses.

Re: adjusting the conversational level

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Mountain fastness with pneumatic tubes. Important distinction.

Re: adjusting the conversational level

[rubricity.livejournal.com]

what's a pneumatic tube?

*duck*

heeheehee

Re: adjusting the conversational level

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I see that someone doesn't want to ride in the crystal zeppelin.

riding the crystal zeppelin

[hattifattener]

She'll just have to settle for the garden monorail.

[sar-anon.livejournal.com]

It's good that you learned this when you were little. It took me years.

I had the interesting trait in grade school that I had a vocabulary 5-6 grades higher than the one I was currently in. Somewhere along the way I got into the habit of trying to find the most correct word for any given object, action, or situation. I had a lot of people give me funny looks, though most wouldn't ask me what the word meant.

Finally in college I stopped looking at people oddly when they couldn't understand what I was saying. Nothing like learning tact.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I'm not completely sure when I learned it, actually. Just that this morning when I overheard someone asking what J. Obvious Word meant, I realized that I would now be able to field the question without more than a startled blink. I definitely had the same thing that you did in grade school, and I drove people up the wall because of it. Lucky for me I was quiet for the most part; I can't imagine I'd have gotten away without getting beaten up otherwise.

One thing that I think helped was learning to rephrase things when people just couldn't hear me. I still like to be able to use the most precise word ("It's the right word! It has the connotations I want! What do you mean you've never heard it?"), but I think I'm less hung up about sometimes having to talk around the concept for a while before someone gets what I'm saying.

Re:

[sar-anon.livejournal.com]

People tried to beat me up in Junior High. I was the 2nd largest person in my class and the largest was a dolt for the most part. I stayed out of fighting for the most part, preferring to sear my opponent with a witty repost; however, that only last so long and ended up having to rely on a witty defensive strategy.

I too feel less hung up on it. Of course it helps that I student taught 7th grade for a year. Spent the first few weeks with my students giving me looks like I was speaking another language. Learned the rephrase trick and then learned to rephrase in successive downward steps until they got it.

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

I now try to approach the issue as if someone had mentioned a handicap they have; for all intents, that's what they did.

I think back on my youthful incredulous gloating as ill-mannered childishness. ("Daddy? Why doesn't that man know that word? *I* know that word. *Everyone* knows that word!") Mortifying.