2001-05-15 - 4:40 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Auld Lang Syne"

My favorite lines (slightly paraphrased) from Chris Rock's "Bigger & Blacker" DVD:

"Everybody talkin' 'bout gun control...
You don't need no gun control.
You know what you need?
You need bullet control!
That's right.
Gotta control the bullets.
I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars.
Five thousand dollars for a bullet.
You know why?
Because if a bullet cost five thousand dollars,
there'd be no more innocent bystanders."

I know I'm writing it like a poem. But his delivery is so critical to how it sounds that I'm trying to get the pauses in there for you. Even the way he says "five thousand dollars" is part of what makes it funny -- he emphasizes the words and drags them out somewhat.

This special is just hysterical. If you're not offended by the language (my mother, for example, wouldn't be able to get past it), I highly recommend it. I made the mistake of trying to eat my dinner in the beginning of it, but you just can't laugh like that and swallow your food at the same time.

I've heard that "Bring the Pain" is the one we really need to see, but it's not on DVD yet. And the VHS tape isn't captioned. Bastards.

OK, this is going to be hard to explain, but let's give it a go.

When it comes to language, I am obsessed with nuance and meaning and how they are expressed, either verbally or non-verbally.

I think I've mentioned before that when someone is relating a conversation to me, I like to know exactly what someone said (choice of words being important) as well as tone.

Reading about American Sign Language and my studies in college of linguistics have made me well aware of how much people communicate beyond the actual words they say and the order they say them in.

Think about sarcasm for a minute. You may have noticed that sarcasm does NOT translate well to the written word. How can you tell someone is being sarcastic? It's all tone and facial expression. Not something that can be effectively conveyed in writing.

Another thing is emphasis, stress, whatever you would call it. It's the difference among the following sentences:

I told her to go.

*I* told her to go.

I *told* her to go.

I told *her* to go.

I told her to *go*.

Five sentences, identical words, identical syntax, five different meanings. I don't even know what the first one means, really.

Last night, I was reading a kid's story in which the narrator talks about her deaf sister. It's a simplistic story (more so than it needed to be, I think), but it had one section that really caught my interest: The deaf sister asked the narrator to take off her big sunglasses when speaking to her.

This is something that makes me crazy. When people are talking to me, and they have sunglasses on, I feel like I can't "hear" them. Technically this is not true -- I can understand every word they're saying. Nonetheless, I am missing a critical component of meaning: their visible reaction to what they are saying, as expressed with their eyes and eyebrows.

In English, a yes/no question is indicated with a rise in pitch at the end of a sentence. "Are you going to the store?" Hear that?

A who/what/where/when question is indicated with a slight rise in pitch in the middle of the sentence, and a drop in pitch at the end. "What time is it?"

Did you even *notice* that before? Nobody *taught* you that, it's just how we do it. It's as critical as knowing the words for "store" and "time", yet it's just THERE, completely unnoticed until some non-native speaker does it wrong.

There are similar conventions in ASL, except they're visual.

In ASL, a yes/no question is indicated with raised eyebrows. If you don't raise your eyebrows, it's going to look like "Are you going to the store." Huh? Was that a question?

A wh-question is asked with the eyebrows knit. And sometimes backwards. "Your car, parked where?"

This just fascinates the hell out of me.

I'm feeling really lucky right now that I have the minimal hearing that I do. It's enough, combined with my intense interest in and attention to this sort of thing, to make my speech nearly normal. The only way you can tell by listening to me that I'm HOH is because my voice has a slight hollow quality to it. It's also enough so that I can understand the majority of the people I encounter in life, mumblers and strong accents excepted (and even hearing people can't always understand them either). And I can grasp things like accents, and the "color" of someone's voice.

Now that I've tried to give a basic background of my interest here, maybe from now on I can just drop examples in without a lengthy explanation.

OK, reading.

I am also feeling incredibly lucky that reading is as natural as breathing for me. I read groups of words at a time (not one at a time) and can sometimes grasp the gist of a paragraph with a single sweeping glance at it. I read ALL the TIME. Even when I'm watching TV I'm reading, because I need captions.

I feel lucky because reading is such a valuable skill, and yet for some people it's incredibly difficult.

Imagine if you have a brain idiosyncrasy that makes it almost impossible for you to grasp the concept of phonetics. Something sends your brain on a wrong turn when you're trying to convert the spoken word to the written one or back again. Much of learning and communication in the world today is through the written word, and although this is changing, there's probably a critical mass for non-written communication. People are always going to need to be able to read.

The English language is a complete mess where phonetics are concerned, which can't be helping matters any. This is probably a large part of the battle for the phonetically-challenged -- for every rule there are two or three exceptions. Look at the letter "A": it has a different sound in all of the following words: apple, father, cane, cinnamon. Good grief. How the hell's a beginning reader supposed to remember all that?! Clearly there's a lot of memorization involved.

There was a panicky article in the Washington Post yesterday about "aliterate" people: those who know how to read but choose not to. I think those people are crazy, but I mean that in the way I think people whose interests differ from mine are crazy.

There's nothing necessarily WRONG with preferring to get information through other means, especially if those other means are sufficient. Me, I prefer to get in-depth information on things I'm interested in. I also enjoy reading just for the pleasure of it, preferring it to television and movies. Especially when I'm trying to learn something; I get frustrated with the History Channel on the rare occasions I watch it because it's too slow and not in-depth enough.

Maybe other people just don't think reading is fun, much in the way you don't find me playing computer games for hours like some people I know. I would HOPE that if an aliterate person needed in-depth information on something, they'd take the time to read. Otherwise, who cares, really? Francine had an excellent, hilariousy-made point to make about this:

Here's something that tends to surprise people who think they know me - it doesn't really bother me. I don't think reading is all that important for the average person. Can you do your job? Can you understand "No Turn On Red"? Ok, then, you can read plenty.

I don't think reading necessarily makes you a better person. I enjoy reading, but that's me. (Accoring to this article, I'm a "voracious reader". Who knew?) Sure, books are fun. So's lots of stuff. Ignoring your family because you just got the latest Terry Pratchett doesn't make you morally superior to someone who ignores their family for the newest "Jerry Springer".

And sure, you can learn a lot from books. Again, nice, but not necessary. All you really need is the ability to handle a spatula and a comprehension level that reaches "when the timer goes 'beep', flip burger." Most people don't need that much information.

So, yesterday when I talked about the bird blocking the sun, this was after a few moments of struggling with whether it might be a bird or a plane, and the relative size (to me) of the sun and of a bird and a plane at specified distances from me. I finally gave up and said "bird", even though it didn't sound right.

Happily, Tino has provided me with an explanation. It's a plane. He reminded me that you can see the shadow of the plane on the ground when you look out an airplane window, something I've noticed before but completely slipped my mind yesterday.

I still don't understand the distance relationships and how to determine the size of a shadow and stuff like that (I have a mental block when it comes to thinking in three dimentions), but Poindexter can probably explain it to me tonight. And you better believe I'm going to ask. His mother overheard us having a technical discussion of this sort once and said "You're two nerds in a pod."

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