Grice’s maxim of quantity requires that one give no more information than is strictly required. This is somestimes misunderstood as a firm constraint, but one intuition you may have—and which is nicely expressed by rational speech act theory—is that apparent violations of this maxim by an otherwise cooperative speaker may actually tell you that seemingly-irrelevant information is, in the mind of the speaker, of great relevance to the discourse.
I recently read two interviews in which the subject—crucially, not a working linguist—drew attention to their linguistics education.
The first is this excellent profile of Joss Sackler, a woman who married into the Sackler opioid fortune. To be fair, she does hold a PhD in Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian literatures & languages (dissertation here), which ought to qualify one, but her response to the Town & Country reporter asking some bad press is exactly the kind of non-sequitur a rational speaker ought not to make: “They’re going to regret fucking with a linguist. They already do.”
The second comes from interviews with Nicole Daedone, the co-founder of an organization (it’s hard to describe, just read about it if you’re interested) called OneTaste. I’ve now read several profiles of her (the first was in the New York Times, I think, years ago, but I can’t find it anymore), and in each they mention that she studied linguistics in San Francisco; one source says she has a bachelor’s degree in “gender communications and semantics” from San Francisco State University, another says she was at some point working on a linguistics PhD there. The relevance was again unclear to me, but later I read the very interesting book Future Sex, which also profiles her. There, there is a brief discussion of the lexical semantics of pussy; Daedone, who is (it’s complicated) a sex educator, proposes that it fills a lexical lacuna, by providing a single term that refers to the human vulva and vagina as a whole.
This all makes me wonder whether to the general public, linguistics really connotes brilliance, and, perhaps, tenacity. And it makes me wonder whether one could actually wield their linguistics education as a shield against criticisms having nothing to do with language per se.