I’m not generally into doing the nitty gritty details of medicalistic categories. But I’ve ended up having to write things like this out (mostly from memory) so many times lately, that I thought I’d write it down in one place and get it over with. Be aware that I do not agree with the official ways that autism is divided up. When I write this, I’m reporting how something is used, I’m not agreeing with the usage. When I talk about PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified) being used “correctly” and “incorrectly” below, I mean “in accordance with official criteria” and “outside of accordance with official criteria”.

A lot of people online say things like:

“PDD-NOS entails a language delay.”

“PDD-NOS kids have a specific way of interacting socially that autism and Asperger kids don’t.”

“PDD-NOS is the intermediary between autism and Asperger’s.”

“PDD-NOS refers to mild autism.”

“PDD-NOS refers to high-functioning autism.”

“PDD-NOS refers to very low-functioning autism.”

“PDD-NOS is more severe than Asperger’s but less severe than autism.”

“Kanner’s Autism is the least varied in presentation, Asperger’s and high-functioning autism the most, and PDD-NOS somewhere in the middle.”

And so on and so forth.

As far as that autism spectrum severity wedge goes, with “Kanner’s” autism at one end, “Asperger’s” and “high functioning” autism at the other, and “PDD-NOS” in the middle, with “AS/HFA” being the “most varied presentation,” I beg to differ in a number of areas, and would direct people both to this post (which seems to show PDD-NOS is the most varied of any autism category, just by its nature) and to my old post on what does “Kanner” actually mean?, because, to quote Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.” In several respects.

Even though the official categories of autism and Asperger’s can be indistinct, they are nowhere near so indistinct as the category of PDD-NOS. This is because PDD-NOS, far from being a distinct thing, is meant for anyone who doesn’t fit into a few narrower categories. It’s also frequently used outside of accordance with the actual criteria.

Here’s how it’s used in ways that the criteria don’t even cover:

• A doctor sees an autistic person and says, “This person cannot be autistic, because he makes eye contact, or shows affection, or likes to socialize (even if in unusual ways), or seems aware people exist, or has a normal IQ.” In other words, the person does not fit the doctor’s stereotype of autism even though they might meet official criteria for autism or Asperger.

  Roy Grinker describes his daughter’s diagnosis in the nineties:

  [The psychiatrist] showed us the criteria for autism and related disorders, all classified under the heading of “PDD,” and then drew our attention to PDD-NOS, Isabel’s diagnosis. But it seemed to me that Isabel did meet the criteria for autism. She couldn’t make friends or communicate with words or gestures. She used repetitive speech and was preoccupied with lining things up in a row. So why didn’t he say she was autistic?

  He explained that while it was true that Isabel had most of the features of autism, she had them to a lesser degree than many of the other children he had seen in his years of practice as a child psychiatrist, and she showed no evidence of being mentally retarded (though the absence of mental retardation never rules out an autism diagnosis). In retrospect, I think he may have been afraid to give us a devastating diagnosis like autism when Isabel was so young and in some ways functioning at a higher level than the children he had seen. As a child psychiatrist from Fairfield County, Connecticut, told me recently: “Things are different now. Even in the mid-90s, autism used to be like the ‘c’ word [cancer], and I didn’t use it if I didn’t have to. So it was only the severe cases that got an autism diagnosis from me. The others got ‘PDD-NOS’.”

  In fact, I remember that, despite knowing little about autism, I felt happy that Isabel had PDD-NOS instead of autism. I didn’t realize then that, over time, PDD-NOS would prove to be an ambiguous and cumbersome diagnosis, that it would morph into “autism” or “autism spectrum disorder,” and that I’d rarely use the term PDD again. Today, Isabel is simply a child with “autism”.

  (from Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Grinker.)

• A doctor sees an autistic person and says, “This person meets the criteria for autism, but autism means hopeless, and I don’t want to label this person hopeless,” or “This person meets the criteria for autism or Asperger’s, but will get better services under PDD-NOS.” This was part of the rationale for diagnosing me on paper as PDD-NOS in the nineties, while telling my parents orally that I was autistic.
• A doctor meets an autistic teenager or adult with an ambiguous early history, and proceeds to diagnose PDD-NOS as a way of saying “I don’t have all the data.” (For instance, I was never told until I was practically an adult that I lost some speech early on, and I have no idea if my doctors had been told that either. A middle-aged friend of mine has a PDD-NOS diagnosis because they don’t know her early history despite the fact that she seems to fit the autism criteria.)
• A doctor has an aversion to “labeling” people and only gives them -NOS diagnoses because they “seem less like a label” somehow. (I had a psychologist like this.)
• A doctor sees that a person has another diagnosis and doesn’t want to tease out what’s autistic and what’s from this other diagnosis. (I’ve met clearly-autistic people with cerebral palsy who got diagnosed as PDD-NOS because of this, even though they met criteria for autism or Asperger’s. This can also happen to people with Down’s syndrome.)

Okay, so that’s just the number of ways that are not exactly in keeping with the real criteria. Some of them used to be used more frequently than they are now, but many are still used this way today. Those are not actually in accordance with the criteria, they’re in accordance with the doctors’ wishes or prejudices for various reasons.

Even what meets the official criteria, though, is still pretty varied. Here’s the official criteria. I’m going to include both DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR criteria since that changeover is fairly recent (2000) and there are still kids diagnosed prior to then who have this diagnosis, and also ICD-10:

DSM-IV criteria for PDD-NOS:

This category should be used when there is a severe and pervasive impairment in the development of reciprocal social interaction or verbal and nonverbal communication skills, or when stereotyped behavior, interests, and activities are present, but the criteria are not met for a specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Schizophrenia, Schizotypical Personality Disorder, or Avoidant Personality Disorder. For example, this category includes “atypical autism”– presentations that do not meet the criteria for Autistic Disorder because of late age of onset, atypical symptomatology, or sub threshold symptomatology, or all of these.

DSM-IV-TR criteria for PDD-NOS:

This category should be used when there is a severe and pervasive impairment in the development of reciprocal social interaction associated with impairment in either verbal and nonverbal communication skills, or with the presence of stereotyped behavior, interests, and activities, but the criteria are not met for a specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Schizophrenia, Schizotypal Personality Disorder, or Avoidant Personality Disorder.

ICD-10 criteria for atypical autism:

A pervasive developmental disorder that differs from autism in terms either of age of onset or of failure to fulfil all three sets of diagnostic criteria. Thus, abnormal and/or impaired development becomes manifest for the first time only after age 3 years; and/or there are insufficient demonstrable abnormalities in one or two of the three areas of psychopathology required for the diagnosis of autism (namely, reciprocal social interactions, communication, and restrictive, stereotyped, repetitive behaviour) in spite of characteristic abnormalities in the other area(s). Atypical autism arises most often in profoundly retarded individuals whose very low level of functioning provides little scope for exhibition of the specific deviant behaviours required for the diagnosis of autism; it also occurs in individuals with a severe specific developmental disorder of receptive language. Atypical autism thus constitutes a meaningfully separate condition from autism.

Includes:

• atypical childhood psychosis
• mental retardation with autistic features

Some examples of how a person could actually meet these criteria:

• Fitting the criteria for Asperger’s, and not the criteria for autism, with the exception that the person had delayed language early in life.
• Fitting the criteria for Asperger’s, and not the criteria for autism, with the exception that the person has a lower IQ than the cutoff for Asperger’s.
• Fitting the criteria for Asperger’s, and not the criteria for autism, with the exception that the person had a delay in self-help skills early in life.
• (For the DSM-IV, but not the DSM-IV-TR.) Meeting the social criteria of autism alone, without the other criteria.
• (For the DSM-IV, but not the DSM-IV-TR.) Meeting the language criteria of autism alone, without the other criteria.
• (For the DSM-IV, but not the DSM-IV-TR.) Meeting the repetitive behavior criteria of autism alone, without the other criteria.
• Meeting the social and language criteria for autism, but not meeting the repetitive behavior criteria. (Meeting social and repetitive behavior without language is mostly covered by Asperger’s.)
• Having “a few autistic traits”.
• Seeming autistic, but having another condition going on (such as cerebral palsy or intellectual disability) that makes it hard for a person to do enough things to fulfill the autism criteria.
• Meeting the criteria for some other kind of autism, but not quite enough (in number) of the criteria.
• Meeting the criteria solidly in one category, but ambiguously in one or more of the other categories.
• Meeting the criteria, but ambiguously in all categories.
• Meeting the criteria, but meeting them (or some of them) later than the cutoffs for other things.

Every time I see people making broad generalizations about what “PDD-NOS” means, I wonder if they know exactly how varied the people are that the word can be officially applied to. PDD-NOS doesn’t necessarily say anything about “severity” (as most people conceptualize severity). It doesn’t necessarily say anything about language development. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about anything, given the amount of combinations of things it can be used for, legitimately or otherwise, and it’s wrong to make generalizations about “the unique manner in which PDD-NOS kids socialize as opposed to other kids on the spectrum” or “the severity of PDD-NOS as compared to Asperger and autism” etc. Those are meaningless statements.

I’ve been trying to determine what makes an environment more accessible or inaccessible to autistic people — or at least to me. I just got one clue this morning, when I almost swallowed a medication that I was meant to inhale.

I finally got in to see the asthma doctors I made the appointment for in January during the asthma crisis. They were, by the way, really good, determined a good goal for my peak flows and gave me an asthma plan. They also gave me a new medication called Foradil.

Foradil comes in gelatin capsules like many medications do, filled with a white powder. The difference is that Foradil comes with a strange contraption. You stick the capsule in the contraption. You squeeze the contraption to puncture holes in the capsule. Then you turn the contraption on its side and inhale the Foradil, discarding the capsule when it’s over.

Where the trouble comes in, is that I seem to learn things like this on a different level than most people do.

Most people seem to have little trouble applying a particular way of comprehending the world all the time. If they see Foradil, then unless their cognitive abilities are suddenly compromised in a major way, they know it as Foradil, an inhaled product, because they have put it into that category without even trying. They know that with Foradil, you take the capsule out of the foil wrapper, stick the capsule into the contraption, poke holes in the capsule, and inhale through the mouthpiece of the contraption. They know this because they’re constantly applying the category of Foradil or of inhalable to these things they’re looking at, this is effortless or close to it.

I have to be thinking about it to get to that point. By thinking about it I mean exerting a fair bit of cognitive force behind sustaining the idea of Foradilness. It’s not (as some people seem to imagine it) a matter of learning what Foradil is, it’s a matter of access to that knowledge being in place at the exact time when I’m going to need it.

I don’t learn to do things that way, I learn to do things by actions in response to certain general types of things. If something looks like a pill, the associated action is to swallow it, particularly if the pill is situated in my hand. I am relieved that I no longer have to give my cat pills because of the amount of effort it took to suppress the associated action of swallowing them myself. And it’s effort against a tide that feels totally natural. So it’s even one moment of distraction and I could swallow cat pills. Or in this case an inhaled capsule. Today I got it almost in my mouth before I realized.

I do regularly screw up which inhaler I use (because marking one red and one blue doesn’t change the way they feel in my hand), but that’s less problematic than swallowing a pill meant to be inhaled.

Part of what makes an environment inaccessible to me — in the most extreme sense — is that things in it are set up (such as pills that should not be swallowed, or drinking cups used to hold toxic or noxious substances) so that an automatic reaction to my environment (without engaging abstraction enough to check things like that) could put me in danger. A more accessible environment to me (and I suspect this is more accessible to most people, too, and just happens to be more extreme for me in the dangers of it not being this way) is one that promotes automatic reactions that I should be taking and discourages automatic reactions that I shouldn’t be taking.

For instance, my apartment has all one sort of flooring — tile. My last apartment had alternations between tile and rug that made it hard for me to get around. This one little change has made me more capable of using the refrigerator, microwave, and toilet even on foot. I also have clear locations for different activities, which allows me to associate different sets of actions with different parts of my apartment. Things like the computer and bed are out in the open so it is easy to get to and from them. But it is not particularly easy to get out a window.

These things also have to take place in the absence of signs. Here’s some illustrations I once did of the assorted fun variations words can take:

The actual text:

This is how it would be read by most people:

Unrecognizable letters

This is where I can tell it’s letters and am processing them as symbols, but don’t actually decode the letters. (They do not, for me, actually turn into such seemingly hieroglyphic characters, I was just picking a collection of things that are both clearly symbols and not readable to most people.)

Nonsense letters

This is where I can pick out the letters but they clearly don’t really conform into words in my mind.

Unrecognizable words

This is them looking like real words that I can sound out and everything but I don’t get any meaning out of the words even if it sometimes feels like I should.

Part of a letter

This is a small part of a letter, I wanted to do an animated version sort of scoping around the letters but I didn’t. I could get wrapped up in the aesthetics of this curve for ages.

One by one, in order.

This is meant to be like reading one letter at a time, but the letters at least staying in order so there’s a relatively high chance of following at least a little of it with a lot of concentration.

One by one, scrambled order.

This is meant to be like reading one letter at a time, but not retaining the order too well.

Squiggles

This is when the forms of the letters are visible as squiggles but not as a readily recognizable set of symbols of any kind.

And none of that even gets into the sort of stuff that Helen Irlen and Alison Hale and stuff have written about with perceptions text, this is other stuff besides that. (And yes I already wear colored glasses.)

If I put a sign up, it’s generally squiggles until deliberately focused on. Sometimes it can be some of the others, but mostly squiggles. Signs have never worked all that well for me because of this exact problem, they simply aren’t read without conscious application of cognitive force, and you have to know they’re there before you apply that force. If I know they’re a sign I’ll probably read them (for form if not for meaning), but I have to know they’re a sign first.

Rather than signs it’s far more effective to put in various environmental cues that lead me towards some things and away from others. But what the best way to implement that is, especially in the matter of something like Foradil, is a mystery to me at times.

The original title was A Way of Describing Autism, but I kept putting the title as A Way of Explaining Autism. Oh well. At any rate, I asked Dave Spicer his permission to make a video of his article, and he said yes. So here it is, an analogy between autistic people (or at least, how lots of people perceive autistic people) and different kinds of rocks:

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=4008095161885466087&hl=en

(Edited to add: Here is Dave Spicer’s website. I met him at a conference years ago, and he was really nice.)

I just had a friend visit for a few days. I hadn’t seen her in a couple years. We’ve known each other since childhood. And one quality she has that nobody else I know does, is registering to me as almost like an object.

When she’s in the room with me, I do not feel intruded upon, even the tiny slight amount that most human contact entails. She is so familiar and has been through so much with me that nothing I can do will particularly shock her. Touch from her (usually in the form of getting my head scritched) is not uncomfortable or patronizing or awkward or any of the other things it usually is. She can read over my shoulder while I type things, which normally drives me nuts when other people do it. And she does not exhaust me to anywhere near the extent anyone else does.

I’ve told her a few times that it’s like being in a room with a rock. And in this context that’s a compliment. It means I’m as close to absolutely comfortable with her presence as I can be with another person. And that’s cool. Interestingly, we both find it easier to relate to each other offline than online.

One of my online friends has obtained text-to-speech software for her laptop and is going to try to use it in everyday conversation.

I am excited for her. I remember when I first found out about communication devices. Through the years, even when it was noted that at the times when I could not speak I could still often write (if anyone bothered to get me the materials to do so), nobody had suggested a communication device. And even when I had noticed that my communication was better in typing even when I could speak (or make speech sounds, which is not the same thing as speaking for communication, although at the time my typing wasn’t always communicative either), I didn’t know that there was any way to act on this knowledge to become a better communicator. It wasn’t until I saw Cal Montgomery switching back and forth between speech and typing at a conference that I got the idea, although it was hard to work up the courage to actually use that idea.

My parents bought me an AlphaSmart at that point in time — the AlphaSmart doesn’t have speech output (at least not without an add-on) but it is portable and cheaper than most text-to-speech devices. My friend (who is visiting right now) bought me a small Remington portable typewriter. I carried the AlphaSmart with me everywhere and used it some of the time. The typewriter, while portable, couldn’t be taken everywhere, but I was astounded to find that often when my mouth was babbling off on some irrelevant tangent that had nothing to do with what I was thinking, I could run to the typewriter and my hands would bang out clearly and coherently what I was really thinking about, even instructions to myself on how to do things. Knowledge I didn’t know I had, because I was so used to “thinking” meaning “scrounging around for phrases to use in speech” (and I then used typing merely to duplicate that feat, which was a waste of typing) that I didn’t realize I had a much more direct line to my thoughts in typing even when speech was technically available.

Once I became accustomed to typing as a means of communicating my everyday thoughts, the speech I had (which had been diminishing over the years in both quality and quantity) became obvious as both redundant and counterproductive. It caused far more pain, far more difficulty functioning, far more of that buzzing in my head that at the time was so common that I thought it was normal (and that I now instead of getting it every day only get after extremely stressful events like conferences or being filmed), and far less communication (when there was communication at all). The last straw for me was a telephone call in which I was attempting to use speech but could only reproduce the word “potato” over and over because the person on the other end of the line had been talking about eating a potato for dinner. And even the “potato” thing was taking maximum effort, the kind of effort where the entire world goes black and silent because you’re concentrating so hard only on getting a word out. Why make the entire world disappear to say “potato” when I didn’t mean “potato”, when it was possible to type complete sentences that more or less reflected my thoughts?

When I recently appeared on CNN, someone who’d met me shortly before I first got a communication device of any kind, told a friend that she hadn’t known me to be as articulate as I was on TV. I’m not too surprised. The level of precision and accuracy in my communication (as in, actually hitting the target I intend to hit, as well as actually reflecting what I’m thinking instead of something else entirely) as well as my clarity of thought in general (even if I don’t perceive myself thinking, it’s obviously clearer now than the muddle I was in before) have increased drastically since using communication devices, and even more drastically since using them full-time. Optimizing communication has meant that I have far more energy to put into everything from basic perception to complex writing.

My online friend can speak most (but not all) of the time, but she finds that typing is more accurate to what she is thinking and takes far less exertion, exertion that she could be using on other things. This is very common among auties. In fact, in 2000, there was a workshop at Autreat called “On Paper I’m Free,” the title taken from a poem by Donna Williams. It was an exploration of the use of writing by autistic people, many of whom could speak with superficial fluency, some of them all the time, but still they had better communication in writing. I submitted my old paper on part-time use of a communication device to that, which described among other things how much more spontaneous and fun my friends found me when I could use a much richer communication system than the speech I had been attempting to use. I was not able to attend, but they apparently read my paper and lots of auties had similar experiences.

The trouble is she’s somewhat afraid to use a device for communication even with the many positive aspects of it. She’s afraid that people will assign motivations that are simply not there: wanting attention, wanting to seem special, and so forth. She of course views it as I do — no different from riding a bicycle instead of walking when the bicycle would be more efficient. Professionals, though, could easily see what she is doing as a step backwards instead of a step forwards. To many people, normalcy is forwards and anything not considered normal is backwards, and the only reason a person capable of appearing normal would do something “abnormal” is for various bizarre motivations that always (for some reason) have to do with how others will see them. But as far as my friend and I, are concerned, the goal of communication is not to appear to be doing something in the normal way, it’s to communicate your thoughts in the most efficient and accurate manner possible. Which is undoubtedly a step forward no matter what that form of communication takes.

Other people might view my friend as doing this to make them see her in a different way. But the only way my friend is taking into account how others will see her is in her fear of taking this step towards communication because she’s afraid others will see her in a very negative light because of it (and will invariably interpret her actions as being about making a particular impression on them, when really it’s about optimizing her communication). I wonder how many other auties could benefit from alternative communication but will not use it because they’re afraid that they already look too normal to “get away with it,” afraid that others will regard them as seeking attention or special treatment, because they’re afraid of how their employers will react, because they or those around them have views that it’s only when communication completely and totally breaks down entirely that a person should have a way to communicate better than they already do.

I’ve watched a few auties now learn of and use alternative communication, and I have never seen it do anything less than enrich their lives greatly, whether they could speak (by which I mean “put their own thoughts into words”, not just “generate plausible sentences”) all the time, part of the time, or none of the time. The only barrier to them doing this successfully has been the attitudes of other people towards their use of the communication devices. Attitudes of disapproval, condescension, and accusations of manipulation. If people would stop reacting this way when other people attempt to communicate more efficiently, then thousands if not millions of people would be able to communicate far better than they do right now. I wish my friend all the best of luck, and I wish anyone who gives her trouble over it to shut up already and get over themselves, and better yet to learn about how much more enriched her life is going to be by this method of communication.

I took some video of the dogs today (sorry for the tiny captioning, I’m still trying to get the hang of matching the video size and the caption size):

An online friend just pointed this website out:

Afforda Speech

They have small DECtalk-based (which means, pretty low-end but comprehensible, they’re what the Link and Liberator systems used among others) speech synthesizers that can attach to AlphaSmarts and PDAs and such, for about $500. Which is still more than I could afford, but cheaper than anything else out there, and could be of great use to people in a lot of situations.

Such as, people who have a broken device and still have to wait some amount of time designated by the insurance company before they can get a new one. People who only need a speech device part-time and are unsure whether they want to go through the whole testing process to get one (I just spoke to someone like this, so hopefully she’s reading this blog because I can’t remember who it was). People who are waiting for a speech device and want something in the meantime. People who have an AlphaSmart or PDA or something they use for communication, but want it to be able to speak on its own. People who want to be able to easily use a custom keyboard. People who already have one device and want a backup. People who want to try a device before they commit to a more expensive one. People who want a device but have a phobia of professionals. Etc.

Not all of them are for sale yet, but some of them are, and it looks really cool and more affordable than nearly anything else out there.

I recently got in the mail the dictionary of Laádan. Laádan is a constructed language that is supposed to be suited to communicating the experiences of women in particular, and also just has a lot of cool words, like doólelasholan (alone at last, after putting up with tiresome people). I had heard that autistic people were trying to construct a language for autistic experiences, but have little to contribute to that: if such a language is constructed, I don’t expect to be able to learn to speak it.

There are, however, a number of experiences (not all peculiar to being autistic, but certainly prominent for many of us) that I really wish could have a simple word or phrase for them. The problem is I have a lot of preferences for these things. Most out-and-out neologisms, words coined out of nowhere, are not my preference. Nor are words (even words like “conlang” for “constructed language”, which I use grudgingly) that sound jargonny and out of place. Nor are words that sound clinical, medical, psychiatric, or excessively long and Greek (it’s usually Greek that comes up with awful words like “monotropic”). Short, ordinary-sounding phrases are more my thing, just novel combinations of words that sound like they could easily go together, but usually don’t. (Given that I’d expect to use these words on a regular basis for actual communication with everyday people, who aren’t likely to learn any of the other things any more than I am.)

I started making this list while I was crashed and sick after the CNN thing. It’s nowhere near complete, and there are a number of things I want to add to it. But here’s what I’ve got so far:

The way things look when they look detailed, sharp, and intricately beautiful, but you know that even an ounce more stimulation will make them sharper and jagged and painful.

The high-pitched buzzing and humming in one’s head that can go with overload.

The point at which language cannot be overloading because it’s not processed as language.

The point at which the meaning of language cannot be understood, but the brain reacts to all language and symbol by trying to decipher it, and failing, generating intense amounts of pain whenever exposed to it.

The state of being able to write but unable to read, and therefore unable to check over what you’re writing to see if it makes sense or not. (May feel like you’re not making sense even if you are.)

A piece of trivia remembered at random at a time when nothing else or little else makes sense (example from my own life: not knowing what a brain was and unable to understand that anything I wasn’t directly perceiving could still exist, but automatically and randomly identifying a particular handshake as Masonic).

The only object in the world at a particular moment that makes sense.

Knowledge that has remained dormant and the person was unaware of it, until the moment it was triggered.

The state of being able to come up with a complex idea, but fully aware that if one actually moves in order to write, the brain will be too busy with the movements and extra perceptions involved to be able to write down and/or translate the actual thoughts.

An ability which seems to spring from nowhere, and possibly to vanish back to nowhere.

Being asked a question, and knowing that the answer is stored somewhere in your brain, but being unable or barely able to answer it.

The kind of person who, upon entering a room, makes communication impossible or distorted.

The knowledge that everything you’re perceiving is extremely detailed but that you’ll forget most of it later.

The vivid sensory echoes of things that have been perceived throughout the day, that flash unwillingly and unstoppably and “as if real” throughout one’s head when overload yet given half a chance to rest, and that may be so real-seeming as to be highly confusing until it’s over.

The experience of finding only one person in a roomful of people whose body language you can immediately and thoroughly read, usually because that other person happens to share your neurotype.

The distortions that come into an action through the application of conscious effort/thought.

The grace, smoothness, and accuracy of an action arrived at through triggering automatic words or movements without the interference of conscious/symbolic thought.

An inaccurate answer given not wit the intent to deceive, but because under real or imagined pressure, one can only come up with an answer that sounds plausible, but is unable to verify whether the answer is correct. (For instance, a friend of mine saying that she has “absolutely no learning disabilities” when asked if she had learning disabilities, when in fact she was known at that point to be dyscalculic.)

A plausible-sounding pattern of words put out in response to another set of words, more by pattern-matching than communication.

The ability to say words you don’t actually understand (in more jargony terms, when your expressive language seems to be better than your receptive, because you’ve memorized so many chunks of word without necessarily the meaning).

A gesture or word that you use for an extremely large number of things and honestly expect or wish people would be able to tell the difference.

This is one of those archive posts I do now and then. From 2001:

How to make a phone call, in 70 easy steps (or, why it takes me so long to get anything done around here) :-)

1. While sitting at the computer, realize that you have to make a phone call.

2. Continue to read the document you were reading on the computer.

3. Eventually, remember the phone call long enough to get up.

4. Stand up.

5. Go into the kitchen, since the phone number is on the refrigerator door.

6. Stare at the refrigerator door for awhile and the orange slip of paper on which the phone number is located.

7. Congratulate yourself for remembering to look at the slip of paper.

8. Open the refrigerator.

9. Stare inside the refrigerator for a few minutes.

10. Close the refrigerator.

11. Go back to the computer.

12. Sit down.

13. Stare at the monitor for a bit.

14. Realize you were trying to make a phone call.

15. Stand up.

16. Go into the bathroom.

17. Use the toilet.

18. Wash hands.

19. Congratulate yourself on remembering to wash your hands while wondering how you got soap on the mirror.

20. Go back to the computer.

21. Sit down.

22. Realize you’re supposed to be making a phone call.

23. Stand up.

24. Sit down on the couch next to the phone.

25. Stare at the phone for awhile.

26. Realize that the computer’s still connected to the net.

27. Stand up.

28. Go back to the computer.

29. Sit down.

30. Tell the computer to hang up.

31. Stand up.

32. Go back to the phone.

33. Sit down on the couch.

34. Congratulate yourself on having actually looked at the slip of paper with the phone number on it.

35. Connect LINK to phone line.

36. Adjust LINK volume.

37. Put on headset.

38. Pick up receiver.

39. Hear dial tone.

40. Wonder if computer is still connected to the phone line.

41. Process dial tone.

42. Hang up the phone.

43. Stand up.

44. Go back to the computer.

45. Realize that you already hung up the modem.

46. Go back to the couch.

47. Sit down.

48. Put on headset.

49. Pick up receiver.

50. Hear dial tone, and process it this time.

51. Stick fingers on keypad.

52. Notice that while you stared in the general direction of the orange paper you were so happy at having looked at, you did not read the telephone number.

53. Think about going back to the refrigerator to get the number.

54. Space out for a few minutes.

55. Stand up.

56. Go to the refrigerator.

57. Grab the orange piece of paper.

58. Take the orange piece of paper back to the phone.

59. Sit down next to the phone.

60. Put on headset.

61. Pick up receiver.

62. Look at paper.

63. Notice that there are two separate numbers on the paper.

64. Figure out that the bottom number is the one you want.

65. Read the number.

66. Put fingers on keypad.

67. Look back at paper.

68. Look back at keypad.

69. Dial number.

70. Get busy signal.

(Then by the time I typed that into the computer, the person I had been trying to call showed up at the door.)