Most of the time when I tell people I did mathematics at university they reply with something along the lines of “Oh, I really hated that at school”.
My brother (who did philosophy) apparently often hears “So can you read my mind?”. I don’t quite get it.
Apparently musicians often hear “Oh, I played the X a while ago but stopped when I left school”. Sometimes suffixed with “Apparently I was good enough to do it professionally, but I didn’t want to”.
Beyond that, I don’t know. I’m sure most subjects have a wealth of stereotypical answers, but I’ve no idea what they are!
So… lets find out. I’ve created a site to gather all those answers which annoy you so much when you get them. It’s pretty limited so far: You just get to add answers and see other peoples’. If it goes well there are all sorts of cool things I can do with the data, but right now we’re at just the basics.
Great idea David!
My favourite so far is the response to someone who studied German: “Why? They all speak English now anyway”
My favorite is the person who studied “Ancient History & Archaeology / Computer Science”, to which the response is “…er… what?”
Linguists get “so how many languages do you speak?” (I love this quote — “Asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a doctor how many diseases they have.”)
Great idea!
Did this get submitted to reddit or something? There seem to be a lot of responses!
I’m a Computer Scientist and a very typical response is, “oh man, I don’t know how to use a computer at all!”