The joke goes:
“How do you get down from an elephant’s back?” The answer is that you don’t because you get down from a duck’s back.
When the savvy blind children told me that when I was one of them out in the playground where I was not one of them, my answer to the joke or at least my logical response to theirs was:
“but you don’t ride ducks” which I thought perfectly adequate. That set me up good and proper for ridicule, scorn :
“She’s stupid”
Assumption which though far from the truth was not surprising, given the fact that most children and adults begin to understand jokes and metaphors which I did in the form of puns which I still love to this day but this kind of literal interpretation can be quite puzzling and annoying. It further muddies the waters of social interaction. I distinctly remember Mum and Nan telling me not to talk to strangers. When someone came round and I didn’t know them I remained mute when they said:
“Hullo, June, how are you”?
Mum or Nan got cross, telling me to answer at once. I got cross, telling them in return, probably in a very indignant voice:
“You told me not to talk to strangers”!
Then they had the job of explaining that they meant if I was outside and someone tried giving me sweets or luring me away. I wasn’t likely to go far without an adult but the streets were safer then so Paul, my brother and I played in the alley or even on the pavements as I grew up in the sixties when everywhere was less choked with traffic and Britain was less populated but there was still crime. You only have to think of the Moors murders up in Manchester or thereabouts to know that. Actually it was Saddleworth Moor wasn’t it so Yorkshire was probably right but Myra Hindley came from Gorton in Manchester if my memory serves me well. Anyway good and bad people are found everywhere so distance didn’t mean guaranteed safety hence my warning which I misinterpreted.
People find this annoying because “Aspie” children, when asked to be quiet, will ask how long they should be quiet for. Once you have given a specific time, say five minutes, they’ll start off again as soon as time is up. Also there are inherent dangers because an “Aspie” child who is told to:
“ride your bike downstairs”
instead of on the bedroom floor or round the landing will literally ride straight down the staircase. This means a care giver has to be absolutely specific or what you say will be done. Also I recall being puzzled by:
“There is a green hill far away without a city wall”,
blind I may be but I knew green hills, or even the “blue remembered hills” of Houseman did not have city walls. I asked about that and am sure my teachers thought me facetious.
“Without as opposed to within, you silly girl”.
More ammunition for the guns of the ridiculers.
I am not sure where the cause of this is located in the brain but literal interpretation of language is real. That’s possibly why some autistic people struggle with fictional novels because either the concepts are incomprehensible or:
“He zoomed into my life like Concord breaking the sound barrier” would be total nonsense since a person can’t look like an aeroplane and as for romantic fiction, well it depends in my case if there’s a nice twist at the end but I wouldn’t sit down with a romantic novel where boy meets girl, falls in love and waltzes off into the sunset, has three children, a dog and a cat and the white picket fence and dies of old age holding hands. Are there any novels like that, by the way?
I do like “Jane Eyre” because it’s moral. She doesn’t sleep with Mr. Rochester till they are married and won’t consent to be his mistress while the poor afflicted Bertha is still living. I love all the Daphne Du Maurier books that I have read but haven’t read them all. “Rebecca is amazing because (spoiler alert) Max killed her but got away with it and I was glad but shouldn’t have been because people should be brought to justice but I didn’t want Colonel Julien to suspect anything or Mrs. Danvers and that awful Jack Favel to find out the truth and the poor unnamed protagonist who, like me, is always unfavourably comparing myself with other blind people and always coming off worse and seeing myself as bumbling and inadequate which Lisa will go crazy to read when she does.
Also there are difficulties with pronouns which I don’t recall having. When K came to Britain, in 2019, she kept writing things like:
“When I get here we’ll have such fun”.
To her before she flew to Europe, “here” should have meant Australia. She was coming:
“there” of course, just as I am here in Britain now and am hoping to get There, safely to Australia in the summer. Otherwise her language skills are good and sometimes written so I know she is an Aussie.
Also neither of us, possibly me more than she, hates “different to” “compared to” “sikth” and now,, shudder, shudder “separate to”. How can you possibly separate something to something? Also something is compared with, different from, similar to and separate from. Also I was driven mad by “fousands” and “anuvver” which this man whose first name I can recall, was saying all this during his analysis of the Hunt budget. Two many people are making mistakes like these for it to only be due to speech impairments alone. Perhaps in some cases it may be due to dyslexia although I’m not qualified to say but whatever the case, many “Aspies are driven bananas (without the rogue apostrophe) which is correct by this kind of slipshod speech and I can hear you saying:
“When there’s a war in Gaza and people are homeless in Britain and Birmingham is to raise its council tax by an enormous twenty percent why the hell are you worrying about trifles which are insignificant as compared with, (not to) these things”?
Little things really do matter
My answer is that little things matter. Language is beautiful and we are the only species who can talk with any degree of fluency and know what we mean. Wars and poverty will always be with us and that matters, too but one set of concerns is not exclusive to the other. We should worry about both. I realise I’m pedantic and don’t correct people now but I did. Sometimes I’d repeat what they just said but insert the correct word. Now I just wince and look uncomfortable, probably disgusted. I’ve less tolerance for those in journalism who have had what passed for a good education and really should know better. There’s a difference in speaking with an accent, be it a Brummie one or a Scouse or Scottish accent, London or any and all others and downright slovenliness. A hatred of all this seems to be a common feature of “Aspies”. K hates slovenly Australian speech: “She dunnit”. A love of puns is also common and one good one with which to finish which Lisa told me or did I steal it from Alexa? “Five ants rented a house and then were joined by five more and became tenants”. I’ve started laughing again so had better do the washing up which will wipe the smile off my face.