It’s Furious Balancing

I love online personality tests and memes. I prefer personality tests. It’s all well and good to know that the foreign city I greatest resemble is Paris and that I am 65% misanthropic, but I prefer the solid standbys¹ of the Myers-Briggs, the Bem Sex Role Inventory², and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. No, scratch that last one. I seriously doubt the MMPI is online³

In any event, I found a nice version of the Myers-Briggs that churned out a spiffy badge for your blog or myspace page or whatever, so I thought I would give it a whirl. I love spiffy badges. I will probably need to create a separate page on this blog to contain them because if I put up all the spiffy badges I found it would look a tad chaotic over here.

I went back this morning to take a look at their Multiple Intelligences Test. I was interested because it measured different scales of intelligence, e.g., verbal, musical, mathematical, kinesthetic, and so on — a nice change from the run of the mill IQ tests, which measure verbal/analytical and spatial relations skills alone. I knew I would score highest on the verbal,⁴ but wanted to see how the other scales stacked up (especially how low I would score in the categories of “musical” “spatial,” and “kinesthetic,” all forms at which I, to be blunt, truly suck).

So, here’s the results:

There’s nothing too shocking here. “Verbal” off the charts and everything else median or lower, some much lower. Pretty typical for me. I’m not at all surprised that “musical” is all the way at the bottom.

Since everyone likes to be told things they already know about themselves, I clicked to read the definition of verbal/linguistic intelligence. Just a sampling:

• Loves words games (Oh, yes.)
• Often speaks of what they have read (Too much, I’m sure some people think.)
• Notices grammatical mistakes (Most of the time, not all of the time.)
• Enjoys writing (A yep.)
• Cherishes their book collection (”Cherish” is a mild word to use, but acceptable.)
• Likes to use “fancy” words (I beg your pardon? Back the truck up, mister.)

[I'm going to degenerate into some snarky commentary here. If you don't like my snarky posts, I'm going to suggest you go to Cute Overload and look at pictures of widdle kitties and bunny wabbits and come back when I've calmed down and am writing about cats and yarn and computer games.]

Still with me? Moving along.

Likes to use “fancy” words? Putting quotation marks around “fancy” contains a little too much condescension, don’t you think? “Oooo, those verbal/linguistic people use ‘fancy’ words to show off how smart they are.⁵ They can’t be normal like us; they have to be ‘fancy’.”

I went on to look at the defining characteristics for the other categories and the only other uses of quotation marks I found were:

• Has a mind “like a computer” (logical/mathematical intelligence)
• Learns by “doing” (bodily/kinesthetic intelligence)

Not quite the same tone, is it?

And what exactly is a “fancy” word? Something with more than two syllables? A word that a person with a steady diet of People magazine, American Idol, and Fox News wouldn’t recognize? But I digress.

A more apt and appropriate description would be “has a large vocabulary.” Geez Louise, how hard is that to come up with? There’s not a “fancy” word to be found in it, either.

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of humor here in that a verbal/linguistic person is rewriting the description of verbal/linguistic intelligence.

I’ll leave you on that (less snarky) note. Enjoy the rest of your day, cats and kittens!

* * * * *

1. I blame Dr. Grossman, my favorite psychology professor in college and instructor of the Methods of Assessment senior seminar. We took a gaggle of standard psych tests and dissected them to see how they were put together, standardized and scored. Good times. [↩]
2. This particular version is “based on” the BSRI, not the real BSRI (legal reasons and all that), but it’s pretty darn close. If you’re at all curious, I came out as “undifferentiated” back in 1985 in my Psych of Women class and I’m still undifferentiated now. Undifferentiated means that I do not have high identification with either stereotypically masculine or stereotypically feminine personality traits. In simple words, I’m neither. I’m not truly androgynous either, which would mean I score highly in both masculine and feminine traits. On the online version of the BSRI, the celebrity photo it showed as an example of “undifferentiated” was Richard Simons. [↩]
3. Even if it were, its empirical keying construction was based upon the responses of institutionalized, psychotic, male, Midwestern farmers during the 1930’s, hardly a reliable demographic against which to compare myself (or anyone, unless you’re a really, really old institutionalized, psychotic, male, Midwestern farmer… Oh, never mind.) It was heartening to read on the Wiki page that the MMPI was updated in 1989, but I still wouldn’t trust it. As far as I’m concerned, the MMPI measures psychopathology only. [↩]
4. Duh! [↩]
5. I seriously doubt the imagined speaker of this sentence would even be capable of using the word linguistic. It’s one of those “fancy” words, you know. [↩]

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Meme. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.