Like all good magazines, we love hearing from our readers. We’re all about how linguistics helps us understand the world; we wanted to hear how the world understands linguistics. So we asked you a very simple question in our inaugural readers’ poll: what does a linguist do? Here are your best, funniest, wittiest and strangest answers.
Of course, there was the usual terminological confusion to be expected with all definitions.
What does a linguist do?
Become an English teacher.
As well as some etymological misunderstanding.
What does a linguist do?
They’re professionals at making/eating linguine.
Indeed, linguine occurred quite frequently.
What does a linguist do?
They don’t necessarily speak many languages (like what I used to think). They just study these languages. Hmm.. maybe like a pasta expert, but he doesn’t actually eat the pasta.
People named Ling were not spared:
What does a linguist do?
Be an expert on people called Ling.
And neither were gymnasts:
What does a linguist do?
A linguist is really a gymnast who does calisthenics by leaning against a wall and speaking. It is quite effective, actually, as people who do this often have nice, sculpted tongues.
We had respondents who were very pragmatic about their responses:
What does a linguist do?
Live like a normal human being, unless he’s weird.
And who were very, very pragmatic about their responses.
What does a linguist do?
Pragmatists are the big shot researchers in the field of Pragmatics.
And yes, how could one leave these out, we had tongues, and we had cunning.
What does a linguist do?
So…’lingua’ is Latin for ‘tongue’. Got it. He does things with his tongue.
I don’t know, but a cunning linguist spends his free time…
They do cunning-
Finally, one person made a very valiant effort to actually answer the question seriously. I leave you with his or her very detailed response:
What does a linguist do?
Let’s just say, a linguist is someone who may obsess about language in a number of possible ways, from how it came to materialize itself in the form of some kind of articulation whether it be gesture, written, or spoken forms of language. Perhaps a linguist might be concerned with how a language looks, how a language sounds, how it is produced, how it is used, how it behaves in society AND how society makes it behave, how it is maintained and passed onto others, how it is taught, and how all the theories surrounding it are applied to help us understand it better. Whew *takes a deep breath*.
