I Love This Stuff

I don't really have the expertise to write this page, but I'm going to write it anyway.

Yesterday I took my mother's meds for next week over to her.   She was the last in a list of errands I was running around town, the last stop of which was at CVS to get her some lipstick, since she's used the lipstick I bought about 3 months ago (I can't even imagine using up a lipstick.  I can't remember the last time I wore any!)

ANYWAY, I was listening to NPR as I drove around and as I was approaching Atria, there was a podcast about words.  I was drawn into it by a woman named Susan Schaller who has written a book called "A Man Without Words."   It's the story of a 27 year old man she met in a sign language class.  He had no words.  He didn't know what language was.  He had no concept of "sound." He saw people interacting with each other and he mimicked them, but he didn't know why. He just thought he was stupid because he couldn't figure out what they were doing.

Hearing her tell about her methods of trying to get him to understand that everything has a name, and the big a-HA moment when he "got it" sounded almost like a quote out of The Miracle Worker, and Annie Sullivan's work trying to get the concept of words through to Helen Keller, and the flood of communication that resulted from that breakthrough.

The interview morphed into one with a guy named Charles Fernyhough, a Brit (of course--who else but someone British would have a name like Fernyhough?) who studied Natural Sciences and Developmental Psychology, with emphasis on child development.

He talked about the relationship between words and concepts.  He gave as an example a rectangular room, painted all white.  You put a mouse in the room and put a treat in one corner and once he learns how to go to that corner he's fine.   But if you pick him up and spin him around and putting him back, he doesn't have a clue in which direction to go.

If you paint one wall blue he still can only find the treat 50% of the time.  Though the mouse can see color, he doesn't know the concept of using that as a clue to find his treat.

Then he talked about children and how they don't make this connection either until they are about 6.  Though children younger than 6 are very verbal, they haven't yet developed the concept of a relationship between things. But around 6, all the synapses are firing and they know objects, they know colors and they know directions and can put all of those concepts together.  

"The toy is to the left of the blue wall" would mean nothing to Lacie, for example, even though she may know colors and directions, but doesn't understand how you can use one in relation to the other. but Bri should be able to figure it out.

I sat there fascinated because I was wondering if Fernyhough had ever applied his theory to people at the end of life.  I have been noticing this vocabulary/concept disconnect with my mother for months.

The plant is looking sick.  Water will help the plant look better again.  But that does not translate into "I will go put some water on the plant."

Likewise, "that silver pitcher is tarnished.  I need silver polish."  But having a jar of silver polish sitting next to the pitcher does not translate into "I can use this polish to polish that pitcher."  The silver polish has been sitting there for about 10 months now and the pitcher is still tarnished.   (I could polish it, of course, but this is an experiment for me!)

I see this over and over with her and had not thought to relate it to toddler behavior until I heard the podcast yesterday. As she loses more and more words, she loses more and more connections.  She can't figure out how to make a hair appointment any more,  I discovered yesterday.

In fact, I was so fascinated by what he was saying that I looked up Fernyhough's web page and actually wrote to him to ask what he thought of my theory.   He'll probably think I don't know what I'm talking about but...hey...maybe I'll open up a whole new area of investigation for him.  But more likely I'll never hear from him at all.

Day 21 -- Happiness is realizing your granddaughter looks like a Frozen princess

(I actually watched all of Frozen today...the plot makes more sense without small children in the room singing and dancing and talking!)

A Cali Vacay

Maybe it's all the senior facilities I've been visiting lately that have made me an old poop (though actually the residents in those facilities are all quite pleasant).

Or maybe I've just become a cranky old lady.

I am seeing more and more people claiming to have lived in "Cali" all of their lives or who plan to move to "Cali" or who want to vacation in "Cali."  An immigration reform spot on TV starts with a girl saying "I'm a Cali Girl"

It's California, people!  "Cali" is as much fingers on a chalkboard to this California native as the phrase "Frisco," which is also used often, especially by people coming to vacation here, not live here. I suspect people living here get the indoctrination pretty quickly if they attempt to use that "Frisco" word. It was anathema to Pulitzer award winning SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen.  Caen was adamant that no one call his fair city (though he was actually from Sacramento) such an odious name, but instead, "Caress each Spanish syllable, salute our Italian saint. Don't say Frisco and don't say San-Fran-Cis-Co," he advised. "It's more like SanfrnSISco."

Besides, Frisco is the name of a REAL town.  At least two of them, in fact.  One in Colorado and one in Texas.  We are neither Colorado, nor are we Texas!

And what's with this "vacay" business?  Has internet shorthand so inured us to shortened words that not only do we no longer text words (LOL, FWIW, BRB, and a host of others) because they are too cumbersome to type onto a cell phone that we are now also too lazy to use full words when we speak?  Is "vacation" such a difficult word to pronounce, using all of its syllables, that we have to shorten it to "vacay" ?

Maybe this shortened way of speaking is older than I realize.   Remember the lyrics to "Just You Wait" from My Fair Lady?

One day I'll be famous, I'll be proper and prim
Go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim

Maybe it's just a product of your time and what you grew up with.   Eliza felt she had had to visit St. James' park often enough to earn the right to call it by its more familiar colloquial name. 

I think I resent the less formal "Cali" because newcomers to the state haven't earned the right to be that familiar with the grand old state in which I grew up.

  

Same with "Frisco."  I suspect that as more and more people flood San Francisco and us old poops die off and Herb Caen becomes forgotten, the term "Frisco" will become acceptable, but never to me.  I'm a confirmed old curmudgeon and determined to remain so.

I am also angry with Rachel Ray, who introduced the world to the "sammie," which is just entirely too cutesy for me to ever order one or talk about it.  I'll take a sandwich, please.

I think back on my time in SF and remember that we always called St. Vincent de Paul Church SVDP.  And, of course, the faithful never say Gilbert & Sullivan.  It's always G&S.  That's how you know you're part of the "family."  Maybe that's not so different from Cali or Frisco...just that different things grate differently on different ears, I guess.

But I'm not going to vacay anywhere and I certainly am not a Cali native and when I order lunch, it will be a sandwich, thankyouverymuch.  I'm a curmudgeonly California native, and proud of it.  And pardon me if I cringe when you tell me you are going to vacay in Cali....or Frisco (shudder).

(There is hope.  My spell check did not recognize Cali, Frisco, vacay, or sammie.  A small victory)

Sticks and Stones

We all know the old children's verse, and those of us who are parents probably repeated it to our children when they skinned their knee or fell and hurt themselves.

Sticks and stones
may break my bones
but words will never hurt me.

Whoever ever came up with that notion?  

I love the description I found in Wikipedia:  "The phrase is found at least as early as 1872, where it is presented as advice in Tappy's Chicks: and Other Links Between Nature and Human Nature, by Mrs. George Cupples"

Mrs. Cupples, you may have been a very nice person, but you are (or I guess were) an idiot!  There.  I've said it.  How does it feel to be called an idiot, Mrs. Cupples?  Does it hurt?

Words are incredibly powerful and have the power to impact your entire life. for good or for ill.  I still cringe when I remember hearing my mother say "You're too fat" when I wanted to take ballet at age 7.  And I smile proudly to myself remembering when Jimmy Wohl, looking at a picture of me, in 7th grade, after I had been on a diet, said that person couldn't be me because she was too thin. 

I still blush when I think of my father teasing unmercifully for misspelling "dessert."  I never misspelled it again, I'll tell you.

I remember the day when our kids were in grammar school.  I was working in the office and was running something off on the ditto machine.  The machine was right in front of a window and there were two students standing outside the window, laughing with each other, pointing at me and trying to decide if I was a man or a woman.  That was so incredibly embarrassing.  I feel my face blush even remembering the incident.

I'll bet everyone reading this immediately thought of a time when someone said something to you that has stuck with you through the rest of your life...and I'll bet you've forgotten all of the playground cuts and bruises you got in grammar school.

I have only to look at the times when I said things I regret terribly throughout our children's growing up years.  If I could take back anything it would be "Jeri knows better," though that line has certainly given my adult children plenty of material to tease me with over the years.

This morning I watched a video of some African adults who had come through the Compassion sponsorship program.  The purpose of the video was to invite them to share what sponsors should write to their children.  Sponsors are always looking for inspiration and Compassion does all it can to make it as easy as possible. It's so difficult, when the letter I write today takes 2+ months to reach the recipient and even if the recipient answers it right away (almost none of them do), that answer will take 2+ months to get to me.  Under those conditions, developing any kind of relationship, especially when your child is too young to write and when there is a language barrier, is very difficult.

But still these Compassion graduates unanimously agreed that the letters were what got them through difficult times.  One man talked about his sponsor writing that she loved him and he broke down in tears these many years later remembering what a difference those words made to him.  "Those were words I didn't hear in my day to day life," he said and he said that knowing that a stranger in a foreign country was proud of him and loved him made him want to be all that he could be.  

Another panelist remembered what a difference his sponsor's letters had made for him when she told him over and over again how proud she was of him and how much she loved him. He said until that time he had no self esteem, but her repeating those words over and over and over to him, words he never heard from his own family,   helped him begin to believe in himself. He is now a self-confident man, a leader in his community.

You saw the pictures of Murugi I posted yesterday.  This is a girl who has written me a total of TWO letters, yet she seemed to find my letters very special.  In the explanation I read on Facebook, she was very eager to have someone take her picture with the letters so she could show how important they are to her.

It hurt my heart to read that she was afraid that if she would come to the United States she would be called a "dirty N*****" and thrown out of places.  I immediately sat down and wrote to her about race relations in this country, about how some people still did not like black people, but most people accepted black people as just a part of the community.  I also pointed out that we have an African American president, and how much I admired him.

I read a book called "Sheba's Song," a couple of years ago.   It's a fictionalized account of the relationship between a man in the United States and his sponsored Compassion child in India.  The book is one long letter to her sponsor, written by the adult Sheba, telling him the things that was unable to write to him when she was a child.  It is interspersed with letters written by the sponsor talking about the life of himself and his family and you can see how the seemingly inconsequential things he wrote to her had a tremendously beneficial effect on how she viewed herself and her life.

We don't always have the chance to see the kind of difference we make in the world, but if we strive to be positive when delivering messages to others, especially children, we may have a positive impact greater than we will ever realize.   By the same token, telling a 7 year old she's too fat for ballet may deliver a blow to her self esteem from which she may never really fully recover.  Isn't it better to try to be positive?

Catillation

Words are so much fun. Says You introduces the audience to two new, fun words each week. Most weeks even the words that I like, I can't remember, though I try. The only one that really stuck over the years was a non-word, "strawphyllactic," which is not part of the English language but should be.

You all know what a strawphyllactic is. You see them all the time if you go to a restaurant and order a cold drink. A strawphyllactic is the paper left on the tip of a straw when they remove the bottom of the paper tube in order to stick the straw into your drink.

As I said, this isn't an official English word, but it came from the Addictionary, a list of words that ought to exist, but don't. I'd like to be part of a campaign to get Webster's to recognize "strawphyllactic" as a legitimate word.

Some recent good Addictionary words are cellevangelist (a person who loudly gabs on the phone in public), tunesia (when you recognize a song but can't remember the name of the artist), tipocrit (one who dispenses suggestions, instructions and advice which they do not and never would follow themselves), photox (using Photoshop to clone out wrinkles, blemishes and other imperfections in photographs), and apatheist (a person who fails to care about the existence of God).

But the Says You bluffing round words are real words found somewhere (though sometimes I wonder where host Richard Schur comes up with them!)

If it weren't for the bluffing round, I would never have known, for example, that "filk" came from folk music tunes for which musicians wrote new lyrics based on science fiction/fantasy themes. It has since evolved to include original songs on those same themes as well as parodies on any theme of interest to the science fiction community (such as cats and computers) and Celtic tunes (particularly seafaring and drinking songs).

This week we latched on to "catillate," which means the licking of plates. Catillation is such a big activity around here. Lizzie's specialty is catillation and I have to keep using it in a sentence to get it firmly affixed in my mind.

I mentioned "catillate" and "catillation" on Facebook and someone responded by saying that they really ought to call it "dogillation" since dogs do more plate-licking than cats. That got me wondering if I could find the etymology of "catillation."

So far I have been unsuccessful, but I did find a reference to a paper by Thomas Blount (can't read the whole thing without paying a fee) which listed catillation as having been part of the first dictionary printed in England in 1604. There were other words from that volume listed too, one of which was "adstupiate."

I have been trying to find the definition for that word, unsuccessfully. But I desperately hope that you could use it properly in a sentence like "Fox News has contributed to the adstupiation of the United States." Or perhaps a book title like "The Adstupiated Thoughts of Sarah Palin."