Clare Henney: March 2010

Have you ever been guilty of judging people based on their appearance? I have.

I was flipping channels and I saw this woman being interviewed on Fox News and I remember thinking that I didn’t get why on earth the news anchor had her on the panel because she didn’t look very smart. I think I saw her a couple more times on the show after that and it made me curious enough to want to see what all the fuss was about. Her name is Marina Orlova and she is called a philologist, someone who studies linguistics and the origin of words.

The way she looks makes you think that she doesn’t have anything in between her ears and I think that she plays with the image a bit to get attention but she is actually smart – I mean, how can you not be when you know so much like she does about the origin of words – old terms or new.

I checked her website and I think it’s very distracting because there’s too much going on but if you click Nerd Words, you’d find a link to words that she has compiled the meanings and origins of. I can’t help but think that using a sexy image is both good and bad for her: the sexy image attracts people to her site but too much sexy in the site distracts people from what her site is really supposed to be about.