A few weeks back, my post On Literal Thinking was republished on Shift Journal. In response to it, a commenter made the following excellent point:
I wonder sometimes if all the anecdotes that describe autistic children as literal thinkers may be creating a self-reinforcing stereotype. Any young child, whether autistic or not, who had never seen broken dishes wouldn’t know how fragile they were. The child might reasonably assume that if she had been told to toss them, they must be made of something that wouldn’t break, just like a rubber ball or other toy. In most families, if that happened, nobody would think much about it after the mess was cleaned up. But if the child happens to be autistic, the story ends up on the Internet as an example of literal thinking. That leads to more parents of autistic children posting such stories, and so forth.
She’s right about the dangers of some of the anecdotes that make the rounds on the Internet; after all, not everything an autistic child says or does is atypical. But in this case, there is a difference between the way an autistic child and a non-autistic child might respond to an idiom that he or she has never heard before.
In the example in my post — about a mother asking her daughter to “toss the dishes” into the sink — the child was definitely old enough to know what happens to dishes when you throw them. My guess is that the literal meaning took over in the child’s mind and got in the way of practicalities. When I look back on my neurotypical daughter’s early years, I have no memory of her misreading an idiom in that way.
In fact, I don’t remember her taking idioms literally at all. If she’d never heard the expression before, she’d probably look at me and say, “Mom! What are you TALKING about?” So, for example, if I told her to “shake a leg,” she wouldn’t just shake her leg, as an autistic child might. She’d know that the meaning was figurative and that she didn’t understand it. Similar anecdotes about autistic kids usually don’t reflect that understanding.
The whole conversation got me thinking about a couple of children’s books I once bought to teach my daughter about idioms. They were on one of the homeschooling curricula that we made use of, and they turned out to be a lot of fun. It occurred to me that the books might come in handy for parents who want to teach their autistic kids what idioms mean and how they work, so I thought I’d share a little bit about them.
The ones we have are called In a Pickle and Mad as a Wet Hen, both by the wonderful Marvin Terban. (He’s written two others — It Figures! and Punching the Clock — but since I’ve never read them, I can’t vouch for them.) Both In a Pickle and Mad as a Wet Hen explain common idioms very clearly and succinctly, and both are full of great illustrations to delight the visual thinker. In a Pickle contains fewer idioms than Mad as a Wet Hen, but is still a very useful book. I got them both because, well, the more idioms the better, right?
Here are couple of interesting examples from In a Pickle:
White elephant: A totally useless possession that you’d like to get rid of.
As the book explains, the expression derives from ancient Siam (now Thailand). In days long ago, a white elephant was considered sacred. When the king was angry at someone, he gave the person a white elephant. Because it was sacred, the beast could never be made to work. It would simply lounge about until its owner ran out of money caring for it.
To get up on the wrong side of the bed: To be grumpy
As Terban tells it, the ancient Romans thought that it was unlucky to get up on the left side of the bed. (The Latin word for left is sinister.) So if you got up on the “wrong” side, you’d probably have a very bad day, which would make you grumpy!
And here are two of my favorites from Mad as a Wet Hen:
To pull the wool over someone eyes: To trick someone
According to the book, in the days when judges wore big woolen wigs, a judge’s wig might sometimes slip over his eyes so that he couldn’t see. A lawyer who thought he had tricked the judge might brag that he had “pulled the wool” over the judge’s eyes.
Are you pulling my leg?: Are you trying to fool me?
Terban explains that, in bygone days in England, a robber would use a cane or a wire stretched across the sidewalk to catch a person’s leg. Of course, after the person fell, he was robbed.
Neither book explains the derivation of each and every idiom, but there is enough information in each one to keep things interesting.
I especially like both books because most of the idioms and their explanations are accompanied by humorous illustrations that reflect the literal meaning of each expression. While I tend to think in text, the text usually brings up a strong visual image, and reading these books sometimes feels like looking at a (very stylized and artistic) reflection of what goes on in my own mind. So, whether your child is a text-based thinker, a visual thinker, or both, these books may very well reflect the ways in which his or her mind works and, as such, may provide a good introduction to the world of idiomatic meaning.
© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
I can’t find any indication that wigs of that period were made from anything other than hair — human for best quality, otherwise horse or goathair. Certainly not wool.
Pepys, for example, refers to the Great Plague being a danger to the fashion of wearing wigs “for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection? that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.”
A better explanation would be that “wool” was period slang for “hair”, and for wigs by extension when their use was universal amongst the middle and upper classes. It would also make more sense for the origin to refer to street robbery: one thug would tip a gentleman’s wig forward (literally “pullin’ the ‘wool’ over his eyes”) while another robbed him. I note that a google search for the phrase tends to show repeated quotes to the same Word Detective article. I am of the impression that the street-robbery origin story is far more likely than the legal one (except, maybe, as an in-joke metaphor referring to the street-robbery sense).
Sorry, you just triggered my… um… Special Interest in historical linguistics.
That all makes a lot of sense. With idioms, there are apt to be many different origin stories floating around, and I imagine that Terban chose the one that made the most sense to him.
And please don’t apologize! Your special interests are always welcome here.
Great point !!
I wonder about this
I also wonder if its not that autie kids are literal – but that some of them simply have an un-naturalness to language and learn it like a foriegn language . Like if i learned a foreign languade today I may have difficulty getting to the nuances of it – simply becasue I do not know enough, do not get enough practice, feel self conscious – becasue I look less able than people who are fluent in it
On the other hand – I saw an article on NOVA where an ASPIE had an MRI done and showed that he/she was literally using a different part of their brain for language
Or maybe both are true
The broadness of the spectrum is something I have been thinking a lot about lately
As we are all talking about autism – but the reality is that we are talking aboout 30-40 autism types
I have stopped thinking of autism as an umbrella and more of as an underpinning
and then there are 30 types
Everybody has autism – but they also have something else
K, that’s a great point about spoken/written language being a second language for many autistic people. It certainly explains why the nuances of spoken language might be lost on kids who otherwise have a very nuanced response to music, art, and human emotion.
It may also explain why I’ve never had difficulty with taking idioms literally. Print is my native language, and it’s how I’ve learned about and made sense of many things, including wordplay. Spoken language is much more work for me. It’s definitely my second language. When I hear spoken language, I often default to the literal meaning — not because I don’t realize the figurative meaning is there, but because I have to work overtime just to translate spoken language at all. I need to keep my brain in the gear of just parsing the literal nature of the words, because most of the time, that’s what’s important.
I believe that (in my case) literal thinking has a lot to do with the way my brain works. And that means basically, the fact that I mainly think in images instead of words or concepts. The fact that many people in the autistic spectrum think in images helps with that. This is not to say that someone who is not autistic cannot also be this literal.
If you tell me that someone is pulling the wool over my eyes I literally see the image of someone pulling a wool sweater (or cloth) over my eyes. But I know from experience that this is an expresion so the ‘translator’ kicks in to find different meaning to the words said.
But, for example, I had never heard the expression “shake a leg” until I read your post. So as it is now, the only thing I can think of is someone shaking a leg. I’m old enough now to realise that if use a set of words that create a strange image, it’s probably an expression and I have to find out what it means. (And in writing it’s easier because you put it in quotes.)
But I still fail at times. I usually just stay quiet until I process posibilites or the closest thing to the expresion I can manage – stuff that sometimes would seem even farfetched. The internet is very handy for this.
When you’re a child it’s easier to just be less restrained, more natural and act on what your brain tells you is the easiest meaning.
Very interesting, Karen. It seems that your experience is evidence of what K was saying in her comment — that for many autistics, spoken language is a second language.
These books sound great! I do not remember having a hard time with idioms myself, probably because I did so much reading from an early age and was immersed in language through that. I do have trouble in conversation telling whether people are being fake or real, but that is in regular speech, not in idioms or cliches.
I have attempted to introduce and explain idioms to my son, and he enjoys using them in his speech, sometimes with humorous results.
It’s so much fun to see kids playing with language, isn’t it?
These books would also be good for English language learners.
That’s an excellent point, John. I’d love to see a similar book in French!
I think better with allegories and metaphors than I do with literalism. As a kid I used a lot of analogies to explain things when I couldn’t find the words to make it clear. I still do that oddly enough. I definitely agree that I am probably using another part of my brain to communicate one that over complexes everything. Haha
Hi Nightstorm,
Like you, I use analogies a great deal in my everyday life. I get a certain kind of delight from them, and coming up with them always feels like great exercise for my brain!
I think one of my favorites was comparing thunderstorms (big ones) to heated arguments.