Victor Vladimirovich Serebriakoff, the co-founder and late Honorary International President of Mensa, has said on record in rebuttal to a similar claim to robwicks' above: "You must not use the word `genius'. If we are geniuses then there are over a million geniuses in Britain, which rather devalues the term".

Mensa is an organisation for those with an IQ score in the top two percentile, i.e. 148 or over on the Cattell B scale (IIRC). As such its members, on the whole, have absolutely nothing else in common.

I tend not to tell people I'm a member of Mensa because it sounds like bragging: "my IQ's higher than yours". The node on IQ goes through all the reasons why this is a virtually meaningless statement.


Update: I am now no longer a member of that august body... twenty quid a year to do nothing wasn't my idea of fun.