Your regular derail from t.txt, this time focusing on linguistic development, language acquisition, and kintsugijin cheating on medical tests during childhood. :P I did not know that was where that came from! Reminds me of little-me. I did sentences, but when someone attempted a standard baby-talk "where's your bellybutton? there it is!!!" game with me, i gave them a cutting look and said icily that it was under the jumper I was wearing at the time. In a complete sentence. Plus disparaging facial expression, communicating "what a ridiculous question, don't you have anything better to ask". (I also corrected my aunt's grammar from pre-school age: "Do you want a snack? There's some grapes, or - " "There are some grapes, Auntie J." Drove people nuts.) Really interesting! What was the reason for the language change? In terms of why people were teaching you Spanish vs English, I mean? I've had mean anons accusing me of trying to sound pretentiously formal in my About page, which... I didn't even remember what was on my about. I looked, and found what appeared to be quite a normal piece of writing from Elph When She's Not Trying To Deliberately Simplify Her Speech. Greatly offended, I rewrote the page in two different styles: one, simplified to mimic "normal" speech; the other, imitating someone who actually is just pawing through a thesaurus to try to sound as clever as possible. The former was legible, the latter disgusting. also-relevant topics: dyslexia, hyperlexia, vision and hearing tests, general failure to match expected development trajectories in relation to School Stuff
I know my parents spoke Spanish and English at home, and I spent a lot of my time at my English-speaking-only grandparent's house. Mom thinks my grandparents forbade me from speaking Spanish due to not understanding baby-me, but considering they encouraged adult-me in learning it, that's more manipulative than I expect from them. Personally, I think it might have been brainweird issues that were never really diagnosed? Especially with the difficulties I had with learning any other language, and how scattered my English itself is, sometimes.
I found the "you're being pretentious with a thesaurus" anon! It's from back when my URL was elphias-treason. Part of my /about was, at the time, this: This is a perfectly normal way for me to speak, either in person or online. As I told the anon, I've spent years "dumbing down" my speech so that my classmates would stop giving me funny looks, and on tumblr I just let myself relax and write however feels right at the time. Here's the whole thing, in reverse chronological order bc tumblr but whatever; you can see where I tried to write as if I was putting it on, and it was painful all round.
