I am tending to answer more straight up now. It took me a while. One thing I've noticed in our case really is if someone asks directly, they usually know something about being gifted. Often they are or have a child that is or something. Since I started out knowing nothing about being GT (I just thought I was some sort of misfit), I am a little sensitive to people who are not indoctrinated into GT terminology and what exactly that means.
I've explained this all to my son. Occasionally he slips and says "Yes - I am a genius". He literally said this to someone he met this week.
He is an interesting character. If someone said something like this to him, it would not bother him in the least. So he has a hard time holding himself back from being very literal and vocal about his strengths. He's willing to be just as literal about his weaknesses. We need to work on phrasing! He really is not at all arrogant about it. To him, he's just stating the truth.
Both DH and I have higher tech degrees, so sometimes people joke around about us like we should all be geniuses. We're happy to live in our geek house.
We live in a GT community, so life is good.
