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Thread: When I was a kid, I did some testing with a few educational specialists and they found I had something called semantic-pragmatic disorder (now called social communication disorder). It's a language impairment that makes it hard to understand and communicate with others.
There were two main practical effects of my semantic-pragmatic disorder:
1) I had trouble staying on topic in conversation because I made random leaps from one thought to another.
2) I couldn't understand idioms and expressions.
1) I had trouble staying on topic in conversation because I made random leaps from one thought to another.
2) I couldn't understand idioms and expressions.
Those random leaps in thought are probably something that many kids do all the time, but I struggled with daily conversation because I relied on memorizing phrases (say, lines from movies that I'd watched) rather than understanding what they meant or how they could apply.
The way I illustrate it these days: Imagine a normal conversation where you say A, the person you're talking to responds with B, then you say C, etc. There's a logical progression from thought to thought. In my case, if someone said A, I would respond with M.
In my six-year-old head, it made sense. My parents or a teacher would say a sentence, and that would send me down a wild train of thought where I'd respond with the tenth thing in that chain. Unless you saw exactly where my train of thought was, you'd be confused.
The second effect (struggling with idioms) meant that I took everything literally. If you said "the elephant in the room," I wouldn't understand how that meant anything besides a real elephant in a room. I couldn't see how words meant different things depending on the situation.
It also meant that I couldn't understand jokes, especially ones that rely on wordplay. Trying to tell jokes was pretty much impossible, too. The only way I could do that was by memorizing someone else's joke and repeating it verbatim, but I couldn't understand why it was funny.
(In a sense that was sort of a positive aspect of how semantic-pragmatic manifested: I had a damn good memory. I could memorize a ton of information. I just couldn't always sort that information and use it in the appropriate contexts.)
Keep in mind, these were problems that manifested every single day. If semantic-pragmatic made it hard for me to have a conversation with adults, imagine what it was like trying to communicate with other kids, who don't have the same faculty of language that adults do.
And this was something that persisted well into my teenage years. I met with educational specialists all the time, working with flash cards and vocab quizzes, all so I could become comfortable with the basics of understanding language and just having a normal conversation.
I don't have a good answer about how I managed semantic-pragmatic (or social communication) disorder other than just getting older, expanding my vocab, and talking with lots of different people over the years. But I did overcome those barriers, however frustrating they were.
And it still kinda blows my mind that this same kid who couldn't have a conversation with anyone else without confusing them and couldn't get why a joke was funny later grew up to use wordplay and turns of phrase while writing crosswords for a living.
Anyway, today marks the tenth Captain Obvious crossword that I've written for the Washington Post. If you ever wondered why I write Captain Obvious puzzles as frequently as I do, this is why. It's a nod to that part of my childhood. I took expressions literally, and so does he.
I shared all of this on my blog. And this is where I remind those who think they can't solve crosswords: Yes you can. It may take time, but if I could overcome a language impairment to write puzzles, you can overcome the block in solving them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/01/17/solution-evan-birnholzs-jan-17-post-magazine-crossword-captain-obvious-starts-book-club/ (/thread)
