Tag: language

What do you have in your mind when you’re looking for a word? When you have an idea, but you don’t have the word, what is the idea?

It’s larger than a sensation, because it’s probably more than one sensation. It’s not a single specific memory. It’s a collection of memories and snippets of memories that define a whole idea. It’s not as large as some memories could be, it’s not a whole long story, because it is small enough to be defined by a single word.

It’s a gem with each facet being a sensation or an abstracted characteristic.

Those things. I think in those things.

I think the reason I have so much to say about Dorothy Sayers’ books (I’ve been posting a ridiculous number of quotes on Tumblr and sparing this blog most of it) is that her overall tone, and writing style, and vocabulary is (a) particularly contagious and also (b) particularly well-suited to writing a certain kind of commentary. (“I don’t always find myself absorbing other people’s writing styles, but when I do…”)

I have so many big words and long semicolon’d sentences (which I love all the time but don’t usually give in to) and also so many thoughts about what was she doing with this book?

And come to think of it, there’s some symmetry between this and other times I’ve gotten all thinky about what I’m reading. I wrote some commentary about A Wizard of Earthsea that was very Le Guin-ish.

Honestly one of the hardest things for me about learning Spanish is/was with close cognates and remembering which spelling goes with which language. I’ve started using Duolingo, and there’s a lot of “see the word in one language, quickly type it in the other” and I keep slipping up. Double letters especially give me trouble. (I’m doing the section on medical terms right now, as you can see.)

depresión/depression

síntomas/symptoms

el paciente/the patient

ocurrir/occur

Ocurrir was the bane of my existence for a while. I second-guessed myself every time I had to write it in either language. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just mixed them together and written “occurr“.

The tricky thing is

If I had been diagnosed as a kid, theoretically it would have been so fucking wonderful. I could have coped a lot better with various things if I’d understood myself better. I could have gotten accomodations in school. I could have had words! to describe! my experiences! and it may not seem like it but that’s a big fucking deal.

I have a lot of trouble interfacing my feelings with the world of Real Things, i.e. things whose existence other people are aware of, which therefore I can talk about. Don’t ask me why I apparently live in General Consenus Reality, I don’t fully understand it myself. I think trouble switching topics and contradicting people’s assumptions is also part of it. Anyway, this is the world I live in, there are Things That Happen and then there are Consensus Real Things, and when the two categories don’t overlap (or I don’t understand how they overlap) effectively I can’t talk about some things I experience. So. Yeah. Having cognitive frameworks and specific words for things that I couldn’t put into words before is a big fucking deal.

But the thing is…

If I had been diagnosed with autism as a kid, I would still have needed the internet and the 21st century to find out probably 80-90% of the things that have helped me so much. Research, scholarship, medical knowledge about autism is not that great, even now. The things a doctor would have told me/my parents would probably not have been that great. Whatever special education I was given would probably not have been that helpful. And it might have been truly horrible.

I thought I made a short post about things like this before, but I can’t find it.

———-

So many things happened to me that shouldn’t have happened, though. I could have learned so many things! I could have spent so much less time feeling just useless and incapable– so much less time metaphorically hitting my head against things until I somehow managed to do them by brute force, instead of actually dealing with my problems! I wasted so much time. And I hurt so much, for no good reason. I couldn’t do things, and I couldn’t explain why, and that doesn’t incline people to try to help you.

I don’t specifically recall being called lazy, but I do recall the simple incomprehension, why is this very smart girl not doing what she’s supposed to do? Why doesn’t she understand that she has to do this? Dear teachers, I didn’t understand why either! I, too, did not comprehend why you sometimes expected me to know things that I just didn’t get! And I still don’t really know why exactly that happens.

———–

Why didn’t anyone notice? Why?

(The smart betting is on: I was “too smart”, and not in a “splinter skill”/”idiot savant” enough way. With “I was female” coming in second.)

Oh, here’s one thing tween!me could actually have told you: I knew I didn’t have like five separate talents, that made me good at different subject areas. I thought of myself as having one talent or maybe two, for patterns and memorization, that happened to be applicable to a lot of different subjects. I would have told you, if you’d asked the right questions, that I was good at spelling and grammar and foreign languages and algebra and geometry to the extent that they were all basically the same– they required the same skill to learn.

I’m not sure if that’s actually significantly “splinter skill”-like or not.

If I have one education-related regret, it’s this:

When I took foreign language classes in college, I didn’t know auditory processing disorder existed.

I chose to take a (300-level) class that focused on speaking and listening. To challenge myself. I knew it would be hard for me and I wanted to shore up that area of my skills.

One of the class participation requirements was that you spend a certain number of meals (I think it was twelve?) sitting at a table in the cafeteria staffed by a student employee and chatting exclusively in the language you were studying.

I think I went three or four times, and then I accepted that I couldn’t handle it and I wasn’t going to get those points.

Because I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I didn’t have the concept that I legitimately have more trouble with background noise than most people. I didn’t have the words to say “I understand Spanish, I just can’t hear you.” I didn’t have the words to say “I can hear, but not with a hundred other people talking in the same room.”

I almost had the words to say “I speak just as little in the cafeteria when everyone’s speaking English,” but I didn’t believe it was an actual problem. I just thought I had to try harder to do as well as everyone else.

Theoretically, though, it is an actual disability. I should have been able to get actual disability accomodations, for it. I shouldn’t have had things my brain doesn’t do well counted against me as failure to study or slacking off. (No, I’m not exaggerating. When I went to the Spanish-practice table and didn’t talk enough, by whatever the student worker’s standard was, I got dirty looks and passive-aggressive complaints about how they had to give me credit for attending even though I wasn’t doing anything.)
I don’t know if my college or my professors would have actually taken it seriously, even if I’d had a diagnosis and all the boilerplate I ought to have, but. That shouldn’t have happened.

——

Prompted by people on Tumblr talking about “modified language learning” programs for people with disabilities.

I think.

You know the thing where putting lots of qualifiers on your statements– “I think”, “it seems like”, “I feel like”– is disproprtionately common among women rather than men?

And occasionally you hear people encourage women to stop using these phrases and try to sound more confident?

I use them a lot, probably partly for gender reasons and for anxiety reasons, but also because (it seems like) if I don’t, I come across not as confident but as too terse or pushy.

Comment/message character limits are bad for me, because I try to be concise and (I think) if I were actually speaking out loud I could make it come out reasonable, but in text it looks short and snappy and unpleasant, or like too much information all at once.

I can be really damn concise, but if you don’t read with the understanding that I’m trying to be as concise as possible, it’s confusing and sounds bad.

It’s like the “narrative zoom levels” thing, except I need people to zoom in on each word and people don’t normally read that way.

People don’t normally say something once, as well as possible, and just let that stand. They explain by repeating, they show all the different nuances of the idea in slightly different phrasing throughout the explanation. You get one idea from a five-page essay, one big complex carefully fleshed-out idea, sculpted in your mind by a whole bunch of different words.

Why did anyone ever encourage me to be concise? Why do I feel like my natural inclination to write in ways that fit in with the above, that circle the same idea multiple times in different language, from different angles, is wrong? I mean, sometimes I keep going longer than I need to, but. My natural, “disorganized”, circling, rambly composition is, overall, more like other people’s good writing than my conciseness is.

—–

This is also why I (ab)use line breaks so much. It’s another way of adding space, of making people pause and think between a bunch of compact sentences.

Related to the previous post, a quote that gave me feelings:

“Even in the Apostles’ days, Christians were too apt to strive after a wrong unity and uniformity in outward practices and observations, and to judge one another unrighteously in these matters; and mark, it is not the different practice from one another that breaks the peace and unity, but the judging of one another because of different practices. For this is the true ground of love and unity, not that such a man walks and does just as I do, but because I feel the same Spirit and Life in him, and that he walks in his rank, in his own order, in his proper way and place of subjection to that; and this is far more pleasing to me than if he walked just in that track wherein I walk.”
— Isaac Penington, 17th century Quaker

 

which I came across on Facebook, because that’s the kind of person I’m friends with on Facebook, is people who post vintage thinky quotes about religion.

Rambling about “dehumanization”

Why aren’t there any good ways to talk about it? You can use big academic words like the above, like “dehumanization” and “denying agency” and (I think this belongs here?) “abject identity”, that place it in an abstract kind of understanding rather than a personal one. Or you can use everyday words that totally fall short of expressing how serious it is.

Sci-fi/fantasy roots make me reluctant to go along with what happens connotatively, which is that “being human”/”humanity” is what connotes to people the sense of being recognized as a real person, with agency, deserving of respect. We have this lovely word, “person”. Which ought to mean that without technically meaning something genetic. But it only gets used in totally ordinary ways, it doesn’t have that connotative weight. The only people who use it for that oomph of “recognize and respect” are pro-lifers talking about “fetal personhood”, because in that context the denotative meaning of “human” would make it sound tautological.

And when I go at it from the angle of trying to describe the actual thing that happens– like I did in my explanation up there– I hit the same problem. The words that ought to technically mean what I’m talking about, like “respect”, have been used so much as buzzwords that they don’t really leave an impression. They go in one ear and out the other and make you think of your grandfather or your gym teacher, going on about something that may have just amounted to “follow the rules”.

I haven’t been able to come up with anything that conveys… the serious definition of “respect”, I guess? without resorting to religious language, like recognizing God in other people, or everyone having equally precious and immortal souls.

 

And the opposite is equally hard to describe. In my last post (and in a lot of others) I ended up settling on “wrong” for when someone’s personhood/humanity/etc gets dismissed, because it’s simple and I think it has some of that connotative weight. “That’s just wrong” is something you can imagine people saying with the right kind of emphasis.