Faking it

While sitting at work today, I wondered idly to myself, “How many topics can I fake being knowledgeable on enough to fool the average person?” I don’t mean to fool them in a mean way, but just enough to impress someone at a cocktail party (because I go to so many of these) or make conversation with friends of friends or coworkers, when you are done with small talk.

Mind you, I do not believe I actually know more about these things than most people I know, but I *think* I can wing it on the following topics:

• games/gaming (credit to Seppo)
• competitive mathematics (credit to most people not being interested :D)
• programming/technology/UI (ok, so maybe I wouldn’t be faking it… mostly sort of kind of)
• cars (credit to Seppo and random coworkers)
• books, reading (I have to pull out books I read more than 5 years ago because it’s mostly light reading lately) and writing (credit to NaNoWriMo)
• crafts, e.g. sewing, building (credit to many friends really into crafts)
• singing & dancing, terminology & hip hop history in particular (credit to watching too much tv & reading too many blogs about it)
• dog training (intro to psych classes, Cesar Milan, Mobi)
• food, both eating and cooking of, despite my terrible palate
• person finance (credit to reading a billion sites)
• communication, both interpersonal and professional
• grammar & etymology (even though sometimes I commit huge grammatical errors, I can usually chalk it up to speaking colloquially ;D)

What about you?