I need to wear a sign that says this ^. I get ribbed for this a LOT. I don't even correct people's grammar in casual conversation anymore (mostly) (although i always make the effort to correct my siblings, because they actually take it to heart, haha). But people who read any of my papers or even some of my Facebook comments, as soon as I say, "I'm majoring in English," say something to the effect of "Oh, you would be." Two people have said this actually intimidates them, which I find interesting, because I am likewise intimidated by their sense of humor or awareness of the world or creativity or ability to debate or…the list goes on. Seriously, I think it's hilarious that anyone could be intimidated by me, period. I mean, have you met me? (Somebody was saying I needed to work on looking more intimidating after two different redheaded pessimists on the bus asked me out [and both of them were significantly older than me, and one of them had just divorced his wife, who left him after alleging he was trying to kill her…yeah. I stayed far away from that guy after that conversation. And then he got back together with her three weeks later and it was moot anyway].)
*This is another one of those posts that turned out much longer than I originally meant it to be; and this time it's all on the same topic, so I apologize if it's somewhat mundane.*
Even my English professor joked about it: we were discussing in class one day how our society is moving in a very visual direction, away from books and written entertainment to visual and audial entertainment like movies. He said , "Most of society is trending that way," and then he looked right at me and said, "Well, almost everyone." He also has made jokes about how I'm the only one in our class of 16 who said I enjoy reading literature.
A couple of people on IM in the last few days have randomly addressed me as "Miss English Major" (followed with this emoticon –> :P ) for no apparent reason. At least two dozen people at KVCC know I have a dictionary app on my iPod touch; one girl expressed mock surprise that I was willing to settle for an electronic dictionary instead of a full-sized print one. I got into an argument with one girl about the use of "cacophonous" in a certain sentence, and after we worked it all out, another girl applauded her (teasingly) for holding her own in a linguistics debate with me.
And then there's those moments when I'll unsuspectingly say something that uses either 1) an above-average number of polysyllabic words, or 2) words that are dated or downright archaic, or else typically employed only a literary context, which I don't realize because I learned them from spending my childhood reading novels instead of talking to actual people. I've literally had people ask me to translate sentences before. Is it something about college that suddenly my nerdiness for the English language is magnified in the eyes of my peers?
I get ridiculously excited over things like proper use of apostrophes in Google auto searches. And it's only in the last two or three years that it's really sunk in that that is not normal. Being good at—or caring about—the printed English language, apparently, is sadly abnormal for a sizeable portion of my generation of fellow Americans. Written English is apparently one of my idiosyncrasies., and I rather like it. But it's manifestly amusing to me that so many people seem to equate "I'm an English major" with "Huzzah! I'm an alien! You can't relate to me at all! I doodle on my knees with Sharpies!" (Which I do, but that's beside the point.) Also, most of my peers seem to assume that people with an English degree automatically want to teach (which I do not; I don't think I have the patience or the speaking abilities for it), and once I say something along the lines of, "I want to edit books for the next fifty years of my life" the conversation is basically dead. Nobody thinks editing is an interesting profession, and to the average person, it looks like a pretty straightforward job, so there's not much conversational material there. The same thing happens when I tell people I want to write—they say, "Oh, like you want to be a journalist?" and I say i want to write novels, which apparently comes off as much less adventurous, even though, technically, with the help of your imagination, you get to travel to places and see things no journalist ever will on the job.
Thus, I feel that I should just save myself the awkwardness of all these conversations where people have this reaction ^ and wear a sign, so they can find out my major before even officially meeting me, run through their subsequent mental processes at their own pace, and then we can be friends, and they can rib me to their heart's content without that awkward first conversation about "What are you majoring in?", and I can go on geeking out over the proper placement of possessive apostrophes and studying mythic poetry and writing effusive blog posts in relative peace.
I love you so much, Kiersten. I'm sorry that everyone has that reaction to you telling them your major. I for one think that editing books for the next fifty years, or writing novels, would be super exciting and adventurous. But then again, I also spent my childhood in a similar way, and am kind of strange as a result :P
ReplyDeleteI think book editing is cool, Kiersten.
ReplyDeleteI, at first, wrote that sentence in all capital letters, until I realized the oxymoron I would've become.