9:50pm June 16, 2015

Interesting… (from etymonline, about fame and rumors)

fame (n.)

early 13c., “character attributed to someone;” late 13c., “celebrity, renown,” from Old French fame “fame, reputation, renown, rumor” (12c.), from Latin fama “talk, rumor, report; reputation, public opinion; renown, good reputation,” but also “ill-fame, scandal, reproach,” from PIE root *bha- (2) “to speak, tell, say” (cognates: Sanskrit bhanati “speaks;” Latin fari “to say,” fabula “narrative, account, tale, story;” Armenian ban, bay “word, term;” Old Church Slavonic bajati “to talk, tell;” Old English boian “to boast,” ben “prayer, request;” Greek pheme “speech, voice, utterance, a speaking, talk,” phone “voice, sound,” phanai “to speak;” Old Irish bann “law”).

The goddess Fama was the personification of rumor in Roman mythology. The Latin derivative fabulare was the colloquial word for “speak, talk” since the time of Plautus, whence Spanish hablar.

I’ve always been afraid I was going to tap the world on the shoulder for 20 years, and when it finally turned around I was going to forget what I had to say. [Tom Waits, “Playboy” magazine interview, March, 1988]

This is really interesting. 

And this is the one area of receptive language I actually have a strength in – picking up vocabulary in unknown languages by comparing word roots from different languages and comparing the different meanings of these word roots.  This requires more skill at (long-term) memory and patterns than at actual basic language comprehension.  So it, along with the ability to hear and mimic native accents at an age well beyond when I’m supposed to have regressed in that area. (1)  

The bolding is my own:  The goddess Fama was the personification of rumor in Roman mythology.

I find this connection between the idea of fame and the idea of rumors, fascinating.  Because the people most likely to refer to me as “famous” or worse an “autism celebrity”, are the same people who love spreading false rumors about me.  And there’s this idea that if you’re in the public eye, even the tiny bit I have been (2) then you’re fair game for rumor-mongering and gossip and people being extremely nasty to you, and you should just put up with it because that’s the way life is, or something.  And you’re not allowed to complain, because complaining about anything connected to “fame” (real or imagined, big or small) is seen as a form of back-handed bragging or something. 

So remember that connection between fame and gossip. It’s real.  And try not to spread gossip about people you consider famous.  Chances are, the gossip is either totally inaccurate, or just accurate enough to make you think that the whole thing people are saying is accurate. (3)  

TL;DR:  The Online Etymology Dictionary shows a connection between the ideas of fame and gossip and rumors, which I find interesting because my only experience of (15-minute) fame involved a shitload of being gossiped about, and I’ve seen the same happen to anyone in the autistic community who gets well-known enough.  People, even autistic people, seem to love to tear down autistic people whose stories make it into the media.  Which reminds me:  We don’t control what story the media tells about us, so don’t assume that what you hear from the media is 100% accurate.  They have their own motivations and perspectives that may not resemble our lives at all. 

(1) Seriously, nondisabled people regress in that area yet because they’re nondisabled, their language regression is seen as a necessary part of growth.  The idea that autistic people’s regressions may serve similar purposes, some of the time, has apparently not occurred to any of these people.  Probably for the same reason that it has not occurred to them that their own language development contains built-in regressions that not every person shares.  Many cognitively disabled people, especially autistic people, don’t seem to lose that ability, or at least lose it much later than would be expected. 

When I first took French at the age of nine, my teacher, a Parisian, called my parents and demanded to know when I’d been exposed to French, because I was picking up and repeating echolalically the sound patterns everyone was using, especially hers, to the point where I even pronounced my name the way it would be in French even though I’d never heard my name in French before.  She was shocked because I did this better than kids who’d been taking French from the age of five, at the same school (where I only arrived at age nine).  I’m not sure she ever believed my parents when they said I’d had no exposure to French.

I also remember my mother talking to someone on the phone about me, when I was really young.  I was hyperlexic in the classical sense – I was good at decoding written language into spoken language, but not so good at comprehending either written or spoken language.

So my mom was on the phone, and she was talking to someone about my piano books.  I was taking piano as a kid, and since we lived in California and whoever wrote the books was actually being a decent person for once, all of the songs were written in both English and Spanish.  Some of them had the entire song written out in both English and Spanish form, one on top of the other.  A couple were entirely in Spanish.  And a couple were in a mix of Spanish and English together in the same version of the song.

Anyway, I now remember her saying something to the effect of, “She sings along to those books when she plays, and she likes to sing in Spanish.  She talks with a good Spanish accent and rolls her R’s perfectly.”  I’m not sure if that counts in the same with French did, because nobody in the parts of California I was from can avoid hearing Spanish from an early age. 

And I am glad I did hear Spanish from a young age, because it means I have the same amount of rudimentary Spanish that I have rudimentary ASL.  Just from picking it up from things around me, like those piano books, or people talking in Spanish, or signs written bilingually (or sometimes with up to ten languages), or Sesame Street, etc.  But at any rate, apparently my Spanish pronunciation at that age was better than my English pronunciation.  Too bad that there’s more to languages than being able to pronounce them or fake fluency (the latter being something I did with English for a long time).  In fact, while I’m far from fluent, my (expressive) Spanish is better than my (expressive) ASL probably.  My parents also picked up a fair bit of Spanish, mostly from Spanish speakers at work.

But at any rate… while I still have a lot of trouble with understanding spoken language regardless of what language it is.  I can sometimes do this thing where I read a document written in a foreign language, without even knowing what language the document is in.  And I may not understand the whole thing but I get the gist.  French is the language I’ve learned the most besides English (and assorted “languages” that most people wouldn’t call a language at all), and I’ve been able to translate papers from French well enough that truly fluent bilingual French/English speakers (which I am not) have approved of my translations.  When I do it in a language I’m less fluent in, I pick up less, but I still might get the gist.  Enough that I can translate simple things with the aid of a dictionary and possibly a rudimentary description of the grammar, or something like that.  I’ve translated Swedish articles by autistic people in that way – getting the basic idea by reading it, then filling in the gaps with a dictionary.  And while I was exposed to Swedish young (from family), I never learned a word of it from family, just the sound of it.  People when I was growing up often said I had an accent that sounded Swedish or English.

Anyway, this has been a reallly long tangent.

(2) And remember, if the autistic community has caused you to lose your sense of scale:  To most people I was a few 15-minute news slots and short articles that happened years ago – hardly a real celebrity.  Even the most famous autistic people aren’t that famous.  And I’m not as famous as the most famous autistic people, not by a long shot.  When people see you briefly on the news in the sort of context I was in, they only remember you if they have some tie to you or your situation.  Most people forget about you fast.  Just because autistic people don’t forget about autistic people in the news very fast, does not mean the rest of the world remembers us in any but the vaguest of ways if at all.

(3) My bullies love to sprinkle in just enough accurate statements to convince people their lies are accurate too.  And the same is true of a lot of celebrity gossip.  They also like to refer to me as famous, because it makes me sound like I have a lot of power and ego, like when Snape and other assholes in the Harry Potter series are always saying “famous Harry Potter” and all that.  But I don’t have as much power as they think I do, and I don’t get much of anything positive out of being in the public eye, on a personal level.  It’s a sacrifice, not a thing I go forward and do because I like it.

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