What Kind of Elitist Are You?

Take the quiz. The results I obtained were unsurprising.

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party.
What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves.
What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks.

Actually, no, I don't do either of the last two things; I'm definitely no universal encyclopedia at the beck and call of every questioner, and while I'm apt to think less of people who can't be bothered to abide by even the most rudimentary grammatical conventions, I'm unlikely to voice that contempt unless pushed to do so by other factors.

Caveats aside, the quiz can't be entirely worthless if it identifies me as the sort to stare in disgust at the sight of someone actually taking pleasure in reading some bestselling piece of hackwork (examples of which shall go unmentioned here, so just assume I'm not referring to your particular guilty pleasure).

Comments

[Frank McGahon]

I got the same result which is a little odd considering the "pleasure" I freely admit to have taken from a certain "bestselling piece of hackwork"!

http://internetcommentator.typepad.com/internet_commentator/2004/10/recommendations.html

[Phil Hunt]

What kind of snob does it make me if I notice that in "how well the entre compliments the side dishes" it should have been "complements" (different word, different meaning)?

Or perhaps it just makes me a pedant.

[Pearsall Helms]

I got the 'Politics and Culture Guru'.

"From Timbuktu to Tijuana, you know all about world culture and politics. You've seen it all, and what you haven't seen, you watched on one of the "smart people channels." Your friends tell you that you should run for governor. What people love: You've always got a great story to tell. What people hate: You make them feel like ignorant plebians. Sometimes you slip and CALL them plebians."

[hex]

This quiz is ridiculous. Just because I get irritated by the sight of people stuffing their faces and would like to meet Beethoven (actually, I would have preferred Bach) doesn't mean I would stoop so low as to insult people's grammar. (I just like insulting their spelling.)

[james]

I must be far too elitist to want to do quizzes on the internet.

[Abiola Lapite]

"I got the same result which is a little odd considering the "pleasure" I freely admit to have taken from a certain "bestselling piece of hackwork"!"

Well, let's just say that there are many others out there who'd concur with your assessment of said work ...

http://www.loudbassoon.com/literature/B/danbrown_davincicode.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552149519

(at the latter URL, see Simon Brooke's review in particular)

I suppose books like the Da Vinci code are to literary-minded types what Star Trek novels are to scientists - shameful lapses from virtue to be admitted to only when under the rack.

[Mrs Tilton]

Well taken, Phil! And not only that, it's odd to worry about how well an entrée complements the side-dishes. Odd, that is, unless one labours under the common misconception that an entrée is a main dish.

And, no, food-and-wine snob (or whatever the relevant category would have been in this painfully obvious quiz) was not what I ended up with.

Abiola, do science geeks really make any attempt to hide their enthusiasm for Star Trek and the like? I thought that sort of thing was more or less a badge of tribal identity for the labcoat set, and that a scientist would be likelier to hide a taste for (say) Restoration comedy. As for The da Vinci Code, what a heap of tripe. (And I say that as a connoisseur of tatty potboilers.) I knew the 'shocking revelations' would be utter bollocks, of course, but [***WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW***] I'd expected at least some innovative and entertaining bollocks, not boring old warmed-over san greal/sang real stuff. I ought to have been warned, though: a friend (an RC theologian, as it happens) was passing through and left the book with me, claiming it was a cracking good read. But *he didn't want it back*, even though it was a hardcover... (The one clever thing the author did was to use Opus Dei as a red herring. It's just so *believable* that they'd be behind a murderous worldwide conspiracy that one is easily taken in. Perhaps that's why my friend enjoyed the book: he can't abide Opus Dei. He must have been disappointed to learn at the end that they were not the villains of the piece.)