SemiOT: Revealing your conlanger status, personal experiences of reactions to conlanging from non-conlangers

I like to read through the archives sometimes - I just pick a random week -
and I ended up reading posts from March 2003. In the thread "My girlfriend
is a conlanger!" (my wholehearted - altho extremely belated -
congratulations to Daniel!), Tristan wrote: "Why would you be a closet
conlanger? That implies you hide the fact that you do it and if someone
asked you, you would either deny it or try and avoid answering the question.
(Simply doing it only at home doesn't count as closet, because it's not
exactly the kind of thing that lends itself to being obviously done on
(e.g.) PT.)"

Myself, when I discuss my hobbies or what I'm doing at the time, I don't
deny it. I just tell the person, "I construct languages!" or "I'm working on
my language at the moment" [speaking of which... I should stop being lazy
and get working... haven't done any work on my languages lately...] (or "I'm
researching the [orthography] of Irish Gaelic - I heard it's pretty
difficult, and wanted to see what all the fuss was about", for that matter).
I'm proud to be a conlanger! :))) What about you guys? Do you hide the fact
that you're a conlanger?

And another question: What sort of reactions do you get when you inform
people that you're a conlanger?

Myself, my grandmother, unsurprisingly (she has no interest in languages -
she only speaks English), reacted negatively (indirect quote here): "To me,
it's just a waste of time... But it doesn't hurt anyone, so it's OK." My
mother, who was present, jumped to my defense, saying something like, "You
learn from conlanging - it gives you hands-on experience with language."
(That statement didn't convince my grandmother tho.)

Trebor.

"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."
--Chinese proverb

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