#amanda baggs

“Many people say the world when they really mean the social world of human beings. The world is so much bigger than that.”

[“These days, autistic people are known for a literal use of language. But as far back as 1946, Leo Kanner described some autistic people as using an unusual form of metaphor in order to communicate. Instead of the figures of speech known to most people, autistic people would invent our own, that had to do with experiences specific to each of us. When I was young, for instance, my brother barked at me out of a closet and I got a horrible startled feeling in my stomach. Ever since then, I referred to that feeling as “the dog.” Many people like me end up with an entire language of metaphors like that, more comfortable with that kind of language than literal language. This isn’t because of being better at abstraction, quite the opposite. Our metaphors deal with connecting one direct experience to another. Some autistic people even find that their own metaphors are similar to each other’s. I once encountered a small group of autistic people who discovered they could communicate with each other easily that way. They referred to it as “the autistic language.””]

Inspiração | Amanda Baggs