Linguists, as admitted by some related scholars, are strange animals. They get very excited about things that the rest of the species seem almost blind to and fail to see what all the fuss is about. This wouldn’t be so bad if linguists were an isolated group. But they are not, and what’s more they have to teach non-linguists about their subject. One mistake that linguists often make is to assume that to teach linguistics, students should be instilled with the kind of enthusiasm for the subject that linguists themselves have. But not everybody wants to be a linguist and, as a friend of mine once said, not everybody can be a linguist. What the dedicated language student wants, however, is not the ability to analyze complex data from languages in exotic regions of the world, or to produce coherent theories that explain why you can’t say his being running in a more elegant way than anyone else can. What they want from linguistics is to see what the subject can offer them in coming to some understanding of how the language that they are studying