Some Journey

Language

I've been thinking a lot about language lately. That's not really unusual. I think about it a lot. I love language. The whole process of language use and aquisition fascinates me. Anyway, Sunday night I read the bookThe Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald D. Davis. A friend of mine loaned it to me because Sam has recently become frustrated by the fact that he is still writing several of his letters and most of his numbers backwards. The thing is, he reads at about a 4th grade level. Not typical of a dyslexic. However, he can't finish a chapter book. He can read 4th grade level picture books, but has trouble completing a 1st grade level chapter book. We've also been struggling with whether or not to have him evaluated for ADD. The guidance counselor and his teacher both feel it would be valuable and that he is a likely candidate for medication. We've always felt that ADD medication was somewhat overused and that there is a very fine line between ADD and just being a 7 year old boy. Anyway, I digress. What does Sam's dyslexic/add tendencies have to do with my fascination with language?
Well, Davis' premise is that dyslexics are not verbal thinkers. When most people read, he says, they think in terms of words. They read a word and essentially hear it in their mind. Davis says that dyslexics are non-verbal thinkers. They think almost entirely in pictures and concepts that flash in their head only slighly more slowly than subliminal images. Therefore, words must each have a pictoral connotation for them, or they have no way to think them. Words like "the" , "a" and "and" don't have easy pictoral representations and tend to be the words which trip up dyslexics most often.
I found this to be an interesting theory. I think a lot about the concept of thought itself, and the different types of thought that we experience. There are those thoughts that are almost intuitive; we seem to experience the understanding of them without really recognizing the thought itself. The instinct to grab a falling child, for example. We don't have to think, "I should drop this laundry basket and reach out and grab him before he hits his head." We just do it. There are also thoughts that we think in concept or pictures only, but we do so conciously. Then there are thoughts we actually verbalize to ourselves.
As I read the book I kept thinking about a song by Suzanne Vega called Language. Here's an excerpt:
If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be
These words are too solid
They don't move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
That flies by and is gone

Another Suzanne Vega song can be credited for the title of my blog, but that's an entry for another night. . .