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3:42am May 11, 2014

"youneedacat never means *anything* literally in the sense of using words super-precisely according to formal definitions"

Thank you, patternsmaybe.  I wish I could get that tattooed on my forehead sometimes.

I got a bit irritable earlier tonight with someone.  I’d written that blog post about how just because I’ve experienced something wonderful in getting diagnosed and treated for adrenal insufficiency, didn’t mean that I’d experienced some kind of ~miracle cure~.  And I wrote something about how this whole thing didn’t mean I’d “found hope for the future” in some kind of disability-melodrama sense, you know the way people are always ~finding hope~ in TV shows and books about disability, where hope = cure and despair = death and those are the only two options.  And I’m certain I made clear what I meant by this.

So someone came along and said “Well it sounds like you did actually find hope, though, in that now you have hope that you’ll live a long time, and before this you knew you were going to die soon.”

Which would have annoyed me already.  But the person who said it, was someone who I’ve known a long time.  And it was someone who seems to bend over backwards, in situations like this, to find a way in which the person really actually did literally mean whatever they say they didn’t actually mean.  I wish I could remember other examples, but this is something going back at least ten years that I’ve had happen over and over in conversations with them.

And to have someone who does that habitually, come to a post I’ve made, and then come there with their only purpose, seemingly, to tell me that since there’s a way you can cognitively bend and twist the words I said around, to make it mean what I said I didn’t mean, then somehow it’s important to tell me that this can be done.

It would be like… same post, when I said this wasn’t a miracle cure, if someone told me that it actually literally fit both the definition of miracle and the definition of cure and that therefore I was wrong.  (Which, it doesn’t fit the definition of either one, actually, but this is just an example.)  It’s like, “I can find a way where the words you say, mean something other than what you clearly mean by them, and I’m going to tell you that actually you do agree with something you just said you didn’t agree with, or you could agree with it if only we bent the words thoroughly enough and shoehorned them into a definition you were never using in the first place.”

I probably shouldn’t be as annoyed as I am.  I’m not even sure I should be talking about how this is a long-term problem I’ve had with the way the person approaches the language people use.  It just really touches some kind of nerve.  It’s after having been in, and witnessed, countless conversations that run like:

“We don’t do ABA in this classroom.”

“ABA stands for applied behavior analysis.  You technically analyze people’s behavior and apply that to their situations, so you’re doing ABA!”

That’s not the best example I can come up with, but it’s hard to think up an example on the fly.  Anyway, over the years I’ve had, and watched, many conversations with this person where they basically do that.  It’s almost like any conversation with them is a puzzle, in which they have to find out a way that you actually mean words differently than you do, so that you can be wrong about what you said you meant about something.  I don’t think there’s any malice involved, but it really, as I said, hits some kind of nerve.  Because it makes me feel like communication is impossible because the other person will find some way in which I didn’t actually mean what I said I meant.

Anyway I wasn’t sure how to respond to it.  I said that it wasn’t what I meant.  And I said something irritable after that.  Because I couldn’t find a way to say it without sounding about as irritable as I felt.  It feels like I’m trying to have a conversation in which I communicate information, and the other person is trying to play games with the language I use.