From the Telegraph on 3/24/13, a story by science correspondent Richard Gray headed:
Get that tune out of your head – scientists find how to get rid of earworms
Scientists claim to have found a way to help anyone plagued by earworms – those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop.
(Postings beget other postings.)
People have been writing me to say that at first they misread abutilon in my posting on this plant as ablution. In Google+, Robert Coren called this an “anagrammatic” misreading; this isn’t literally so — people aren’t going to misread glean as angel, for instance — but it’s right in spirit. Three things are crucial: the status of abutilon as a very rare word, one that many people don’t know at all and others see very infrequently; the relationship between the spellings ABUTILON and ABLUTION; and the frequency of TION as word element in English.
An arresting summary in This Week in Psychological Science, of “Learning, Memory, and Synesthesia” by Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer (in Psychological Science for January 10, 2013, (24)1):
Individuals with color-grapheme synesthesia experience color when viewing written letters or numerals. Although some studies examining whether there is a learning component to synesthesia have returned negative results, these studies have examined very small numbers of individuals. Witthoft and Winawer revisit this question with the benefit of a larger sample. Eleven individuals with color-grapheme synesthesia completed a color-letter matching task in which they indicated the shade of the color they associated with each letter of the alphabet. The researchers found that participants’ color-letter associations closely matched those found in Fisher Price magnetic letters sets — which all but one of the participants had owned as a child. The authors suggest that these findings demonstrate a need to include learning and memory components into explanations of synesthesia.
The Fisher Price alphabet:
The full article (available only to subscribers) is very clear that these results don’t mean that some number of synesthetes have simply learned the letter-color associations from refrigerator magnets. For one thing, a huge number of children have been exposed to the Fisher Price alphabet, but the number of synesthetes is small. Witthoft and Winawer suggest that a small number of children are inclined to synesthesia, and that for them, exposure to colored letters and numbers can provide models for their associations.
Yesterday, writing a postcard (by hand), I intended to quote an old (and not particularly good) dirty joke with the line “How far is the Old Log Inn?” in it, but started writing
How far is the Old Logg
when I saw the error, crossed out Logg and went on with Log Inn.
The error? I’d anticipated the double N in Inn, transferring it to the G of Log; “doubled letter” was part of the plan.
On Facebook, Ry Schwark reports the following exchange:
Jenny: I miss Bukkake.
Me: (Stunned Silence)
Jenny: Yeah, I mean, the Japanese dance.
Me: You mean Butoh?
Jenny: Yeah, the other Japanese B thing.
This is about as clear an example of a Fay/Cutler malapropism as you could want.
In the April 7th New Scientist, an interview with Michael Barton (“Mapping the language minefield for kids with autism” by Alison George), leading with:
Why do people with autism, like yourself, find the English language so confusing? Autistic people think in black and white and therefore interpret everything literally. Ordinary people seem to love using idioms, metaphors and figurative speech, whether to aid communication or simply to make life more interesting, whereas for autistic people they simply make no sense.
An addendum to my posting on Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love, about her husband Paul’s aphasia:
Paul’s tortured search for words reminded me of work by Samuel Beckett, the wild and woolly Irish playwright, novelist, member of the French Resistance during WWII, and literary assistant to James Joyce. In his best-known play, Waiting for Godot, Beckett describes God’s inscrutability as “divine aphasia,” and God utters such aphasic gibberist as “Quaquaquaqua.” [compare Paul's mem mem mem mem] I had a new appreciation for Beckett’s character Watt, who speaks with aphasic peculiarity, jumbling word order, letters, and sense until they’re cockeyed and no one can understand him. (p. 175)
Things get worse.
Two things coming together: my reading Diane Ackerman’s moving book One Hundred Names for Love (2011), about her husband’s aphasia following on a stroke; and a Stanford Report piece on Mark Applebaum’s performance piece Aphasia. Both stress the expressive deficits characteristic of aphasias and the distress these deficits produce in the aphasic.
When I awoke on Sunday, a random fact (probably a dream remnant) claimed front seat in my thoughts:
Zez Confrey is the composer of “Kitten on the Keys”.
Remarkable that I should have known this in the first place — though I do have one spirited performance of the piece on my iTunes (by Alan Feinberg on his album Fascinatin’ Rhythm) — and even more remarkable that I retrieved the memory. Why?
Well, Zez is about as Z-heavy a name as you can get (and even more compact than Zardoz). Fact is, I notice words with a Z in them, especially names, and they get lodged in my memory.
Actually, I notice them even when I’m not reading text, and attending to it, but merely noticing the text in passing, at a glance. I don’t think I’m looking for names with Zs, but even when my attention is focused on something else, my mind takes me there. I’m implicitly attending to the letter Z.
Every so often, I come across someone reacting with surprise and puzzlement at some word or idiom — because it’s unfamiliar to them (they don’t recall having heard it before), because it strikes them as rare, because they find it opaque, because it sounds peculiar, whatever. Often the object of surprise is a reasonably common and long-standing usage, so that the complaint is itself puzzling.
In this vein, Michael Thomas cried out on Facebook on Sunday:
what the hell kind of word is “RECENCY”?
Melinda Shore weighed in with the first response (“It’s an excellent word!”); Ken Callicott playfully ventured the answer “A noun?”; and Garabato Abrelatas Inalámbrico Arvejas thought to check a good dictionary:
Huh. OED dates it to 1620. I guess it’s pretty cromulent.
The other responses were all over the map. I’ll get to them eventually, but first a straightforward answer to Mike Thomas’s question.
