We all seem to have tiny little mental blocks, micro-aphasias, things that we, try as dammit, cannot learn. My mother couldn’t remember the word “volcano”—she was a perfectly fluent native speaker of English, with no other language difficulties, but whenever she came to that word it was always “one of those mountain-things with smoke coming out of the top” or similar, followed by several seconds until the word came to her. I have a block on the ideas of “horizontal” and “vertical”. Whenever I read these, I feel my mind blurring; I know which two concepts they map on to, but for a second or two (which feels like an eternity in the usual flow of thought) I cannot fluently map the words onto the concepts. Usually I break the fog by making a gesture with my fingers—somehow, this change of mode (moving my fingers from left to right strongly associates with the word “horizontal”) dispels the confusion, it must trigger a different part of my memory associations. Quite where these odd little blocks come from—and, why we can’t just learn them away—is fascinating.
Archive for October, 2016
Mental Blocks
Thursday, October 27th, 2016Casual Swearing (1)
Tuesday, October 25th, 2016I like the casual use of—often rather strong—swearing in very day-to-day situations. Last night, there was a small group of people standing outside the Sainsbury’s Local on the corner. The following conversation took place:
– Have you got the hummus?
– Yeah, sure.
– Thank fuck.
The singsongy rhythm of the last couple of phrases was particularly neat.