Listeners step up to help a caller from an earlier show who was seeking a succinct way to explain that a brain injury sometimes makes it difficult for her to remember words. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Explaining Why Words Won’t Come”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Remember that call we got from Sarah in Texas? She was the bank teller who’d had a brain injury. Oh, yeah. And she was talking about how she sometimes has difficulty finding words, and it’s especially difficult because it’s an invisible injury that she can’t really…
Right.
She’s looking for words to explain it to people without having to do a long conversation about it every single time.
Right, right. And she was looking for language to help her along in a really efficient way. And a lot of people wanted to help her out.
We got lots and lots of emails and phone calls about this. Maria in Dallas also has brain injuries and suggests just saying, oh, I’m sorry, I’m having word trouble from a brain injury. Just really straightforward.
I get that.
Crystal Kelly from Florida says, why don’t you use a technological metaphor like sometimes my brain and mouth don’t sync up.
Oh, very good.
We also got a really interesting letter from Joanne in Simsbury, Connecticut, who has neurological problems as the result of Lyme disease that also have the same effect, that sometimes she can’t find the right word. And she used to work as an artist and photographer, and she says that now she does volunteer work where she has to use the phone a lot.
And she uses her visual memory. She actually keeps written lists of common words and phrases next to her so that she can look at those lists and kind of have them fresh in her mind or I guess look at them during a phone conversation.
But she also said that since her illness, she’s developed a couple of interesting unusual conditions, one of which is hyperlexia, which usually occurs in children, and that’s a near obsession with the written word and trouble with the spoken word, which I thought was really interesting.
She said, I’ve decided to use this to my advantage and have begun to write short stories and personal essays. Right now, I’m 500 pages into my first novel and enjoying the process immensely. So wish me luck.
And she said the second condition that she has is called palynopsia, which is a visual hallucination involving an image of a written page that stays superimposed on her vision even when she looks away.
Wow. It’s actually kind of fascinating. She said, it’s like seeing through a clear sheet of acetate covered with the most recent page I’ve read. It’s most visible when I’m staring at a white wall.
This image can remain for weeks or until I read another page. And since I read so often, the images change quickly. Like the late Oliver Sacks, I’ve decided to regard both of my new conditions as interesting rather than disturbing, and I’m choosing to use them in an advantageous manner. I feel that a positive, unapologetic attitude about these conditions helps.
How outstanding. Yeah.
If we could all treat our illnesses in that way. Yeah.
Every time you come across a difficulty, find a way to genuinely make it an advantage. That’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a challenge, of course, but I thought that was just such a graceful way of dealing with that kind of thing. That’s so wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.
If you’ve got something to say about language or anything that we air on this show, give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
