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Trisha has started an interesting thread about language in Tenets of the Secret Fraternity of Linguists, but the discussion has gone so much further and broader than this. I was intrigued by much of the conversation. This is just a heads-up that you might want to check it out.
(The title above refers mostly to my post this morning, but the conversation before is the really good part. You'll have to read that for yourselves.)
[ January 07, 2005, 08:30 AM: Message edited by: Sara Sasse ]
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How do you link to a specific post WITHIN a thread like that, using a bookmark? How do I tell what post # my post is, so that I can have my link jump down directly to what I wrote in a thread?
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Farmgirl, one way is to do a search for the post and when you click on the containing thread in the results list you also get the post number in the address bar. However that doesn't happen all the time I think, but you can always count the posts. Knowing that there are 50 posts in a page there's really not much counting to do. And then you just have to be careful to include enough 0-s in front of the post number.
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I really don't know how I did it. I edited the post when I realized my first link was to my post, not to the start of the thread. Posts: 2919 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I click on the "Show most recent" link to get a link to a post at random instead of the page opening one. Then I use guess and check to get the right number. Note, though, that there is a page field as well, which you have to update to link to posts on a page after the first.
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I think we are all somewhere on the autistic spectrum. There are no normal people. I mentioned neurotransmitter exhaustion there- I think most of us are overstressed, not properly nourished, and sleep deprrived. But how this comes out depends on your neurobiology. Also the neurobiology is somewhat shaped by past experience.
Years ago I read about a phenomenon called "kindling" in which psychiatric patients tend to relapse, usually with greater frequency and severity as time progressed. It used to cause me a lot of anxiety. But I've gone 12 years without a major relapse. But it's a princple that tends to inform my view of the brain. The more something happens, the more it will continue to happem.
I currently lean toward Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which encourages (among other things) not acting out on symptoms.
In a disorder like deafness, using sign language doesn't make one more deaf. But I'm less inclined to simply accept a mental illness as something that should be happily resided in as a variation, because I think there is the possibility of it making one "worse".
P.S. I have found the tunes on Cranium (i.e. "stairway to heaven") to be things we think we should know but aren't easily recognizable. The only part of that I could hum would be the "She buying a stairway to heaven" part.
[ January 07, 2005, 12:27 PM: Message edited by: Trisha the Severe Hottie ]
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I have learned a whole lot about the brain in the past month. As a teacher, i have always felt sympathetic to students with learnign disablilities, but now I have true empathy. Things are returning to normal very quickly, but boy is it scary when your brain goves your body a direction and your body says no.
I can write almost normally now, but when i was still in the hospital, I wrote like a kindergartener. I could actually feel my brain straining from the work it had to do.
Driving. I am driving now, but it is not the same. I concentrate very hard, where I used to drive almost without thinking, or so it seemed.
There is always a gift in every experience we have. I will never look at a person who is physically or mentally disabled the same way. I will never take the basic movement and pattern of thught I have for granted again. They are very complicated machines, these bodies we inhabit.
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I've been tied up with work, computer problems and snow for the past couple of days. I skimmed the "parent thread" and this one and wanted to share something that might be of interest. Figured this might be the most relevant thread at the moment.
For anyone interested in the social construction aspects of disability, there's a great account of a real time and place in our own country - a time and place in which deafness was not considered a disability or even deviant. (I don't think anyone has mentioned this book. Apologies if I missed it.)
It's been awhile (probably over 10 years) since I read it, so here's one of the customer reviews on Amazon that gives some good information on the book:
quote: Inspiring and interesting, February 9, 2002 Reviewer: lifeboatless_earthling (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
This is one of my favorite books of all time. Originally written as an ethnographic study, it is also completely readable for a non-professional popular audience. Basically, it is the story of the islanders of Martha's Vineyard, a large island off the coast of Massachusetts. The islanders originally came from the same 2 or 3 boatloads of colonists from England, by way of Boston and Scituate, from a region in Kent which already seems to have had a high incidence of hereditary deafness. Due to the geographic isolation of the island, recessive genes for deafness, which were already prominent in the original Kentish colonists, came increasingly to the fore. As the proportions of islanders who happened to be deaf gradually increased, what was the islanders' answer? Not shunning the deaf. Far from it. Rather, a tradition arose that EVERYONE on the island, deaf or hearing, simply learned sign language as children!
This book is full of fascinating little anecdotes, about how island society worked to include its deaf members. For example, we learn about families and friends, some deaf and some hearing, who would regularly sit next to each other in church. The hearing members would sign the sermons to their deaf friends. Or, sometimes groups of people who could hear perfectly well might be together, for whatever reason, and they might happen to converse by signing just as much as in spoken English. Everyone spoke both languages.
Some of my favorite parts of the book focus on the benefits of signing. For example, perhaps two neighbors wanted to converse, while being separated by 200 yards of noisy space, made vocally impenetrable by sounds of surf and sea. Whether they were deaf or hearing, they could get out their spyglasses (this was a 19th century whaling community, where spyglasses were in every household) and sign to each other across the distance while viewing each other through the magnification afforded by the spyglasses. One entertaining anecdote tells of two young men, who could hear perfectly well, who would use their signing ability to pick up girls off-island. They would pique the girls' interest in them by signing amongst themselves, and would claim that one of them was deaf. After they had secured the girls' interest, they would put on a lengthy, well-practiced charade of deafness to keep the gils curious about them. Do they ever let on that they can really hear? You'll have to read the book to find out! Bwa ha ha haaaa ( that's the sound of an evil laugh).
Those are a few minor anecdotes. The whole book is packed with stories like that, and it's endlessly amazing. The last couple of chapters make excellent, general points about the human issues raised in the book, and about how we as a society think about the "handicapped" -- perhaps, as Dr. Groce points out, we should not use the term in the first place.
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Maybe I was wrong about the deaf not being perceived as having compensating qualities.
When I see people with disabilities, I always think of my son that died. (He ultimately died of internal bleeding during a heart operation.) One of the things someone said to try and help me after that was "Well, if he had survived he probably would have had brain damage so it's for the best." but I didn't agree.
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