Jo

I use the word 'Ravenclaw' less to mean someone who has lots of brains and/or knowledge, or indeed whether they're smart, and more in terms of personality. Someone with a Ravenclaw personality has traits like the following:

• Saying "fascinating" unironically.

• Having emotional affection for libraries as a class.

• Reading more than one biography of the same person.

• Going to history museums on vacation.

• Enjoying doing homework for their favorite classes in school/uni.

• Complaining that a movie got something completely inaccurate.

And there are a lot of associated traits that commonly pop up, like:

• Wearing glasses (due to improperly developing eyes in childhood, due to lack of exposure to sunlight, due to spending free time indoors instead of outdoors, due to preferring reading to playing outside).

• Knowing tons of random facts.

• Having at least one university degree.

• Being able to read three languages.

• Having a lot of raw brains (ie, g, what IQ is supposed to measure).

And there's a lot of overlap with English majors, so you see a ton of Ravenclaws with English-major characteristics like:

• Writing fanfiction.

• Wearing scarves.

• Liking cats.

• Thinking swords are cool.

But you also see a lot of overlap between English-major characteristics and woman characteristics, because English majors are ~70% women. So the vast majority of English majors will:

• Pee sitting down.

• Like Pride and Prejudice.

• Think that troubled men with tragic backstories are super hot.

Even though those traits aren't present in the majority of Ravenclaws. And you'll notice that tons of English-major traits are that level of common among English major partially because English majors are usually women, such as liking cats or writing fanfiction. Or perhaps whatever causes women to like cats and writing fanfiction is the same thing that causes us to be English majors.