Re: "Coming out" about conlanging to people in Academia [was Re: Caryatic]

Tom Wier wrote:
>How many of us here have "come out" to people in academia, and what
>have the responses been like?

The experience Tom mentions seems about typical IMO.  Some academicians take
themselves SO seriously

I wasn't involved in academia long enough for the problem to have arisen; in
grad school days, I can only think of one or two professors who might have
been amused/sympathetic (the same ones who would occasionally present
"Hypothetical" data for gram./phon. analysis).  Our UM linguistics group did
have a meeting devoted to "inventing languages", as it was called then; only
2 or 3 students presented anything (not I, since I wasn't actively doing it
then) and the whole thing elicited, I'd say, polite perplexity.  BTW this
was in Post-Tolkien times.
Well pre-Tolkien, when I began boarding school in 1949, it became known that
I invented languages, and that marked me immediately as weird, queer,
not-one-of -the-guys etc. (synonyms for nerd in those days).
Tolkien, and the offshoot computer RPG-ing, certainly has made a
difference-- not to mention fora like this list, Langmaker, Ideolengua et
perhaps al.

Off-Off-Topic:  our UM group also had a very popular session devoted to
speaking backwards (perhaps not unrelated to conlanging?)--using a
reversible tape recorder to judge the results.  I managed to get out the
first sentence of Don Quijote (...aStnám al ed rágul nu ne), but John Lawler
took the prize with his rendition of Humpty Dumpty, at full speed.
Speaking of backwards, does anyone remember "Ilsa Popping and Her Pixieland
Jazz Band" (mid-late 50s)-- a pseudonymous group, European I think.  They
experimented with playing and singing backwards/forwards, i.e. 1.sing and
record a song 2.play it backwards 3.learn that version 4. sing and record
the backwards version 5. play that backwards and record as the final version
Wonderfully strange!!!

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