Published on 12, July, 2020
The stereotyped autistic person is obsessed with maths, science, technology, but I wondered if there is another type who is obsessed with words, correcting word mistakes, dictionaries, learning new words etc. A Word Nerd.
I am a proud Word Nerd, I have zero interest or skills in maths, science, technology. It is a reason I didn't even consider I was autistic until I was in my 40s/50s- I wasn't a computer geek, so I couldn't be autistic, could I?
What do you think?
I have a word obsession as well. There is something called hyperlexia, which is a child's precocious ability to read sooner than normal, which some autistic people have.
For me, I did learn to read early and easily. I read significantly faster than other people and spelling is something that comes automatically to me without effort. I remember at school when we were learning to spell, and having to do spelling tests, and I didn't understand why. To me, once you see a word you know how it's spelt, because the word has a "shape". I always got full marks on spelling tests and for a long time I never understood why people spelt things wrongly. It used to really annoy me.
I remember one time when I was seeing a psychologist and I questioned something she had written, and she seemed shocked and said "you can read upside down?". I thought everyone could... because it's the same word, just rotated. You still recognise a triangle if it's upside down? But apparently most people can't, they struggle to see the letters and have to sound out the word backwards.
When I was a teenager I became obsessed with etymology. I became very interested in Old English, and I've taught myself Latin. I really want to learn Sanskrit but struggling to find the time, but that's basically top of my list of things to do if I ever can quit my job.
I see in my head the spelling of words whenever people are talking, and I watch everything with subtitles on because I want to see how people's names and places are spelt. Unfortunately in my experience the subtitles are wrong in every show, on every broadcaster and streaming service. I obsessively collected the examples of incorrect subtitles and used to send them to Netflix and Amazon Prime but they never responded or did anything about it. I still collect them anyway, I have a folder with over 1000 images.
I like this reading upside down too. and mirrored. Fun stuff. This is very hard to in cursive though! I am not so good as you with the spelling though. Letters sometimes scramble as I think and type them, coming out out of order or with elements of the word I want to use, or am thinking of, before and or after it. If I can spell a word out loud as I type it will get it right, though.
ha- the netflix bumbles, so true.
I share your love of languages too. I would like to know 4 before I live this planet. I have english. spanish and Japanese. I am choosing a forth now. It's a tossup between Hawaiian and maybe a western European language.