(no subject)

[ewx]

Alledgedly I'm an "interpersonal thinker". It says:

Interpersonal thinkers:

• Like to think about other people, and try to understand them
• Recognise differences between individuals and appreciate that different people have different perspectives
• Make an effort to cultivate effective relationships with family, friends and colleagues

Other Interpersonal thinkers include:
Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, William Shakespeare

Careers which suit Interpersonal thinkers include:
Politician, Psychologist, Nurse, Counsellor, Teacher

(The quiz is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo/thinker_quiz/index.shtml)

Comments

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

But I hate syntax! I find it incredibly boring. I wish modern academic linguistics wasn't so obsessed with syntax. I like sound change and inflectional morphology and detecting inherited relationships between languages, and lexicostatistics, and things like that.

I agree, though, that there may be a mismatch between this quiz's idea of "linguistic" and academic linguistics. I suspect some of the questions I gave negative responses to would have contributed to me not coming out as a "linguistic thinker", for personal social reasons rather than anything to do with my analytical approach to things. For example, the question about whether you like to tell stories in groups, or something like that - I gave a very low response to that one, because I'm just too shy to want extended conversational turns in groups.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Phew! I'm not the only syntax-disliking linguist around then! In fact, we seem to have some similar interests (although I'm not sure about lexicostatistics) - many of which come down to 'finding patterns'.