Published on 12, July, 2020
In another discussion, this has been raised as an area which people on the spectrum find difficult.
I have found references to this problem in every book I have read so far.
As an undiagnosed person, this is one aspect that I find difficult to understand in relation to myself. If I am missing non verbal communications, I cannot be aware that I am. I am able, however, to understand quite a lot of the above, and have assumed so far, that this is just something that I have learned. (I'm another child of the 50s) So why is it such a big issue in books on asd?
People with aspergers are as intelligent, or more so, than nt people. So why would they be unable to learn that a phrase may have more than one meaning. Words with multiple meanings are commonplace, eg wind, cheque/check, love, row, tier/tear
. Do we not learn some of these things with time? I am slow at getting jokes, but get there in the end.
Do other people here, find this to be a major issue? Is Frankie Howard really beyond the comprehansion of those on the spectrum? I don't mean to be rude in asking this, it is just the one thing I have read that really doesn't seam to fit.
With regards to a lot of double meanings, I think living on the Internet sort of helps... after a while you've heard it all and actually start to expect certain things, like rude double entendres. When I was younger, everyone else seemed to be getting a joke that I wasn't, usually sexually inappropriate. With regards to other turns of phraze, I think it is often not so much that I don't understand the phraze perhaps, but I might think about them differently than an NT person would, like "it's raining cats and dogs" - I wouldn't think it was literally raining cats and dogs but it would turn into "why do they say 'cats and dogs'?" and "Poor animals, that'd really hurt..." and most NT people would wonder why I'd even be bothering to think about that...