Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

(I plan to make these threads from now on. Downvote if you disapprove. If I miss one, feel free to do it yourself.)

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

(I plan to make these threads from now on. Downvote if you disapprove. If I miss one, feel free to do it yourself.)

Learn a little bit of linguistics.

I'd be interested if you were to expand on this.

I'm not the OP of that comment, but as a linguistics student I can corroborate. I think there are a couple of reasons that occasionally throwing a relevant piece of linguistic information into a conversation can produce the smartness impression. Firstly, conversations never fail to involve language, so opportunities to comment on language are practically constant if you're attuned to noticing interesting bits and pieces. This means that even occasional relevant comments mean you're saying something interesting and relevant quite frequently. This is an adva... (read more)

2Grognor14y

It has worked for me. People are impressed when I point out their own sentence structure, things like how many phonemes are in the word "she", etc. I don't know if this also helps signal intelligence, but I also rarely get confused by things people say. Instead of saying, "What?" I say "Oh, I get it. You're trying to say X even though you actually said Y." Also, I guess it seems like a subject only smart people are interested in. And not even most of them. Guess I got lucky in that regard.

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Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012

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