Language
It was an enigma to some teachers at school as to why I was so good at foreign languages, yet so completely useless at English. In my O-level exams, English was the only subject I got close to failing. On one occasion, in the class I was pretty much bottom of, we were given a piece of prose without punctuation and told to add the punctuation and capital letters. I was the only person to get it 100% correct, much to the complete puzzlement of the teacher. But this just exemplifies the approach I had to language: logic.
When I was young, I took the view (though not consciously) that language had two purposes:
- Conveying factual information
- Comedy and telling jokes
As for poetry, I didn’t see the point. I wandered lonely as a cloud…a host of yellow daffodils… Yawn. What a waste of space. And I could never remember any of it anyway. (I had poor short term memory, which meant I also couldn’t learn lines if called upon to do acting, which I also couldn’t do.)
I was told I had no imagination, and should read more books, which I found really tedious. The truth, though, is that I had a poor grasp of the meaning of intangible adjectives and abstract nouns. In many cases I had completely the wrong idea of what the words meant. So I would use the wrong words in the wrong contexts and be misunderstood. In reality, I had a very strong imagination, but not one that connected with vocabulary. I thought, and still do, predominantly in pictures. Putting pictures and abstract concepts into words is something I still have difficulty with, but I am getting better at it.
Interestingly, I joined joined a German conversation group in 2001. There it dawned on me that I had almost no abstract vocabulary. I had lived in Germany for nearly a year as a teenager and yet hadn’t picked any of this up.
After being healed, I enjoyed watching Pride and Prejudice and the Forsyte Saga (much to the bemusement of my eldest daughter). Previously I had seen such programs as a pointless waste of time, but after being healed I was fascinated by the intricacies of the relationships. But this is probably more to do with the body language than the actual words.