Thinking about a conversation I was having with an acquaintance years ago. He was a friend of a friend and we were talking about food. I forget the exact phrasing but I brought up loving avocados. He said “what’s that?” I was a bit surprised and explained. He responded “OH thats crazy I thought that was one of those made up words”. The statement was like a flashbang I had to contemplate for a few minutes. PERSONAL STORIES ONLY, DO NOT INCLUDE A STATEMENT FROM A CELEBRITY OR POLITICIAN.
To be fair there’s several ‘types’ of Chess, like Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, etc…, and it’s not uncommon for high-level players to specialize in some of them. But given that they didn’t know what a GM is they probably didn’t know that either.