d. m. arney, m.a.

It’s hard to see, but we as speaking/hearing humans are incredibly biased toward verbal abilities. The IQ test is conduct verbally, we assume that misspelling words means the writer is either careless or not very good. Mispronunciation is a capital faux pas, yet most everyone pronounces words incorrectly depending on the region and dialect. My english teacher this morning pronounced in media res as “in meedeea ress” but my Latin instructor would pronounce that “in medeea rey”. And how many of you say “That present was given to him and I”? Years from now, we will be the savages that failed to recognize the intelligence beneath the verbal problems. Every time I see this bias, I think of Eric, 24 year old man with Downs Syndrome. He wasn’t stupid, he was trapped inside a brain that didn’t communicate verbally. But when I looked closer, I saw his very clear, very ordered thinking.