Theme
12:38am June 30, 2014

fierceawakening:

The stuff in the last post is also why I feel really confused and frustrated when people use a neologism or community-specific word and someone asks what it means and is snarked at with “Google must be down today.” A Google search can give you a definition (or, in my experience, often gives a DESCRIPTIVE ARTICLE without a concrete definition), but that’s not really how we learn to use words. We learn language as little humans by hearing or watching it used and picking it up. Dictionaries and such are what we use when we are “learning vocabulary,” a thing most of us start doing in school, long after we’ve started learning how language works.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not a valid way to learn words. If it weren’t there’d be no Merriam-Webster. But it’s a derivative way of coming to understand stuff, and I think because of that, a lot of the time we — or I, at least, back when I was more involved — began using words without really being sure quite what they mean and how they work. But since I Googled and Googling is less offensive than asking, now I was in the thick of things but couldn’t be sure I was saying exactly what everyone else was. And I hoped this would go away and it kinda did as I used words but it never totally went away and sometimes I’d just be like “Do I know what ‘oppression’ is? I know what injustice is, I know what injustices I’ve seen are, I get the idea of generalizing them, but how do I know if kinky people losing custody of their kids is ‘oppression’ or not? How do I know which reasons for getting fired are ‘oppression’ and which are not?”

I mean, I get that people don’t always want to define things for other people. I get burnout. I get wanting to hang out with people who get it and not people who don’t. But the idea that Google replaces conversations has never, ever sat well with me.

I know what you mean.

Also, there’s lots of words I never learn, no matter how many times they’re explained to me.

And also words where it’s like I know the word, I know the meaning, but I can’t read the word in context and understand it.

Intersectionality is like that.

I know the word.

I know the meaning of the word, intellectually.  I could probably write a small essay explaining intersectionality, better than a lot of people who use the word o n a regular basis.  

I know the meaning of the word, emotionally.  I experience it, it is a regular part of my life, it is a gut thing, a thing that punches me in the gut every day, a thing that can’t be separated out from my life in any meaningful way.

And still I can’t use the word, and I can’t read the word.

I have gotten so much shit over that particular word.

I have been told that I must not experience multiple oppressions.  Or at least not multiple oppressions that matter any.  Because if I did, then I would magically be able to use this word.

I have been told that it’s because I’m white.  Given that I have the exact same problem with similar words that have no particular racialized meaning, I seriously doubt it.

I have been told it’s because I don’t have a deep enough understanding of the way oppression and privilege intersect with each other in complicated ways.  I’m pretty sure I have a very deep understanding of that kind of thing, even if my understanding comes to different conclusions than the trite, almost mathematical ones you’ll hear trotted out a lot.

I have been told everything except the truth:  I have a language-related learning disability.  It’s that simple.  I’m hyperlexic.  Hyperlexia, in its classical form anyway, involves better expressive than receptive language (and an echolalia-based language learning process), such that a person can use a word in context without knowing what it means.

In my case, it means that I can have all the parts of the meaning of the word, but no ability to put them together all at once when I read that word.  There are some words that no amount of giving me the definition will help, because each part of it is separate, I cannot connect them together while reading, so what I get is an explosion in my brain, near-physical intense nerve-like pain, and a decline in my cognitive and reading abilities that can last for some time.

That’s what hyperlexia + autism is like for me.  It’s different for every person.  But for me it’s like that.  And even if Googling worked for me, which often it doesn’t (inertia means Googling requires crossing a mental boundary line, hello autistic catatonia!).  All that would do would be to give me a compartmentalized definition of intersectionality.  That definition would sit in a file drawer in my mind, lost and unable to be found again when I needed it, certainly not able to be used on the fly.

And that’s another reason “just google it” doesn’t work.