1:11pm March 4, 2012

Language skills that develop when others are missing

I think I still retain one of the skills I used the most often to handle language growing up. My language comprehension, as opposed to (superficial) expression, ranged from “meh” to nonexistent. And so did the ties between my superficial level of expression, and what I was actually thinking. I wasn’t aware that I was allowed to not do this elaborate stuff I did to make my speech sound relatively normal. I mean, I don’t know who I thought wouldn’t allow me, there was just this nebulous terror of not doing it right. Other than that I wasn’t always sure what the point was.

So in order to do that, I needed all kinds of skills other than actual, solid language comprehension. And one of those skills was the ability to… I don’t quite know what the word for it is. And I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing and confusing people. So I’ll just try to describe examples.

One of the reasons I’ve been able to make my list of buzzwords and jargon in the most popular forms of the Internet “social justice” community, is this exact skill. It lets me see which words and phrases have been sort of pasted into people’s conversational patterns within this specific community. It even lets me see that about words that have a normal use and are used differently in that community. (Like “navigating”.)

This same skill, as a kid, let me see the way kids used words in specific play situations. The exact tone of voice and word pattern used for imitating sports announcers while playing around with a basketball (“…and he shoots …and he scores!”). Same for reciting slogans like “She-ra, princess of power!” and “They’re more than meets the eye.”

I could also often tell if a word (by sound, not spelling) was used very differently in different contexts. This would allow me to follow the rule I’d made about this, which was avoid using such words if at all possible. Despite not knowing the meaning of any of these words, I could tell that when I heard about the “AIDS antibody test” on the news, it was different somehow from when kids would run around the playground touching each other and saying “you have AIDS, and you have AIDS,” etc. Which was also different from when people talked about aides who worked at the school. Which was different from when someone would say “this aids you in remembering to do your homework”. So I would avoid using any of those words at all – to be forced to do so caused me this terror that I would be “caught” somehow. Caught doing what, by who, I still wasn’t sure. I just knew it was bad and didn’t question that.

I was also good at spotting words and phrases that were used and reused by specific people. This backfired in my face though because somehow I got the really bright idea (sarcasm) that I ought to use such phrases in conversations with such people. Invariably they got angry and yelled at me or went away.

For instance there was a girl who would tell people “You always [do/say] that. Always.” She was not thrilled, to put it mildly, when I began using that phrase back to her whenever she said it. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think that’s what made her start avoiding me in seventh grade. There was another girl who, if someone got the slightest amount of food on themselves while eating, always said, in a specific tone, “You have food all, over your shirt.” I got so I could recognize when it was coming, and one day I said it in unison with her after another girl got spaghetti sauce on her shirt. She got really pissed at me and said something snarky about how I must be psychic or something. I don’t think she had a clue how often she said that. It took me till adulthood to work out why this was pissing people off rather than making them like me.

And that’s just a sampling of what this particular skill allowed me to do. It was in fact one of the main forces behind my ability to build such an enormous store of phrases and contexts that I could fake a good deal of the language skills I didn’t have. I didn’t know I didn’t have them, mind you. At least not until I got older and began to suspect I was missing something in communication that other people had. I just thought I was required to do this, for no apparent reason. I’m sure it had something to do with something that was done to me at some point, I just don’t remember what.

And a huge motivating factor was fear. I still don’t know any concrete thing I was afraid of. But one of the things that spurred me on to get better and better at this was the fear of being caught. I didn’t even have to be caught accurately. I just had to have someone suspect where my language came from to be terrified.

I almost never read A Wrinkle In Time because of this. It went like this:

I was standing on the back porch and my brother was down on the ground. We were blowing bubbles with handmade bubble soap. My mouth (there wasn’t a shred of intent behind this) came out with a sort of combined-echolalic phrase. It started off with “How bout” because that was a standard sentence starter. And then “mousy-blah hair”, which came from a Peanuts show on TV. So I said “How bout mousy-blah hair?”

My brother said something like “Have you been reading A Wrinkle in Time?” In a tone as if he’d caught me out at something. Now he was wrong. He was completely wrong about the book. But he thought I’d got it somewhere (correctly, but that barely changes anything) and this terrified me. Every time I saw the book after that, the terror returned. And the incident replayed itself in my head for years.

It was just as bad if people were wrong completely, though. One time I was actually able to tell someone of a visual phenomenon that came from either status migraine aura, or some other component of my weird visual perception – possibly also what happens to my vision when I stare at one spot too long. It looked like a grey or white fogginess. And so I said something about seeing fog.

The guy got an “I am oh so superior to you and I look down on your puny attempts to fool me” tone to his voice. And he said “Don’t you know that in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the fog machine is actually shock treatments?”

And I was mortified. He was wrong. Completely wrong. But somehow that didn’t matter. I never mentioned visual fog again until a researcher asked me a question where explaining it was the only possible answer.

When people accused me of getting things from books or television or specific people, whether they were right or wrong it drove me on to more and more sophisticated ways of taking and combining words from different places. Ways that would render the source undetectable. I never fully escaped such accusations. But I got good enough to fool most people.

And when I’d finally made the transition from mostly noncommunicative language to mostly communicative language, the basic source of my language never changed. It was just now used to describe experiences almost all of the time. Where in the past it was used for terror of not using it, and sometimes it was communicative but mostly it wasn’t.

And I still have the same skills I used back then. The ones that let me tell patterns in how people use words. I even still have remnants of the old rules. Which is why it often pains me to use language I have identified as part of certain kinds of patterns. It’s partly what drives me to put “social justice” in quotation marks: A remnant of the rules I used growing up. The rules that meant I wouldn’t be caught dead imitating sports announcers. To do something like that feels like straining against huge, tough rubber bands. They may eventually snap but they’re so hard to get past that mostly I just don’t.

I’ve often wanted to catalog all the different contexts and word phrasings I worked out as a kid. And still work out for that matter. But it seems too hard. There’s so many, and I can only put words to the descriptions of a handful.

This is a good example of the kind of skill that develops because another set of skills is missing. I don’t mean in order to compensate. I mean that it’s completely shaped by the absence of certain other skills. It would not be the same, possibly not be there at all, if I grew up able to perfectly understand language and attach thought to communication. And I have a lot of abilities that work that way: They are formed a certain way because other abilities, that would normally affect them or render them redundant, are not there. Or because of large gaps in my knowledge. Or that kind of thing.

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