I like to think Alex is a little more normal — or, like everyone else, manipulative — than might first meet the eye. Most obviously, there are the exchanges that go like this:

“Crackers?”

“How about pretzels, Alex?”

“How about crackers?”

or

“Alex, we can buy one book today. One book.”

“Buy two books?”

Image (Paul Klee's "One Who Understands"): Ben Sullivan, Flickr.com

That’s just wheeling dealing; that’s just how everyone gets through the world, and it’ll be great to see develop, just like it would be in a “normal” kid, until it inconveniences me. I know he understands stuff, too, but just doesn’t let on he knows. Like it takes dynamite to wake him at 6 a.m. on a school morning, yet he pops up like a dawn sparrow on weekends. I used to think this was just autism making my life a twisted mess until it occured to me that somebody at Alex’s school must say to him “Have a good weekend — see you Monday!” on Friday afternoon. So he knows it’s Funday the next day, and he’s happy and eager to bounce up at a Marine Corps hour, just like any kid would be. It’s just that any kid might also tell you so.

But sometimes it does feel like yes, you’re driving in traffic with Alex, but instead of red, yellow and green, the streetlights are blue, pink, and brown.

Consider the street-crossing scene in Rain Man, where Raymond stops mid-way through the street because the walk signal changes from Walk to a blinking Don’t Walk. “No, Raymond/Alex,” I feel I could explain, “you cross when it says Walk and you can still cross when it says Don’t Walk but it’s blinking. You have to stop when it says Don’t Walk and it’s no longer blinking.”

“No longer blinking,” I’m sure Alex would say. You and I would reply “okay” to these instructions. Alex, I think, would repeat one or two key phrases from the instructions. I also think that soon he’d continue walking on the blinking Don’t Walk. From his perspective, the result would be the same. From my perspective, I wouldn’t be immediately sure — “no longer blinking” isn’t “okay” to my brain — that Alex understood.

That doesn’t mean Alex wouldn’t or doesn’t understand the world. It means I still don’t understand his.

“Retarded” as been used three times in the past six months aloud in my office: “That’s retarded!” “He’s so retarded!” “I’m not a retard!” Each time, the word flew right out of a cubicle, clear and loud, for all to hear.

Anyone older than 5 could imagine many words that would cause quite a stir – not to mention a lawsuit – if they flew with such abandon right out of cubicles. “Retarded” and “retard” don’t seem to be among those words.

I Googled the word and turned up some 18 million hits (down from more than 19.1 million when I Googled it two years ago, so that’s progress). Hits have included a band with the name, “retarded animal babies,” and “movie criticism for the retarded”, which on Google scored right ahead of “Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons”, so that’s progress.

Jill and I often think of how Alex looks to other people: on the street, in restaurants, at the airport and on the bus and the subway. Many people still look at Alex. Sometimes Alex notices them, sometimes not. Sometimes he answers them in a somewhat appropriate way if they ask him a question; sometimes not. “That’s the way they communicate,” one woman said to me once in a McDonalds, meaning autistic people, about whom she seemed to know something; I somehow thought it a kind observation, though I was just guessing.

Alex is a nice-looking kid. Dark hair and eyes. A killer glance when he makes eye contact. Slim, downright skinny; it’d be hard for most people older than 5 to see him as any kind of threat.

Not like the time an “older” guy from a special-needs high school in Ned’s school building got into Ned’s first-grade classroom. “He ran in and sat on the teacher’s chair,” Ned recalls, adding that he himself hid under his desk until somebody came and fetched the young man. A few days after that incident, when Jill picked Ned up from school, Ned’s teacher said Ned was great when the guy came in, telling her not to be scared and that the guy was just “sensitive, like my brother.” I like that somebody else had to tell me this about Ned, and I especially like that S word.

The New York Times reported yesterday that marketers are showing increasing support for the disabled. Special Olympics is also taking pledges from visitors against hurtful language (“Spread the Word to End the Word”).

A gene linked to susceptibility to autism, CNTNAP2, has also been connected to specific language impairment, the most common childhood language disorder, as reported yesterday in Reuters. The study, A Functional Genetic Link between Distinct Developmental Language Disorders, is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Specific language impairment involves difficulties with language and, in particular, the repetition of nonsense words. Researchers analyzed CNTNAP2 function in 184 families with common language impairments; children with certain forms of the gene had certain difficulties with language, such as the repetition of nonsense words. It was found that FOXP2, which is mutated in people with a rare speech and language disorder, “directly regulates expression” of CNTNAP2. CNTNAP2 has also been linked to epilepsy, schizophrenia, and Tourette’s Syndrome and may not be specific only for language, but may also play a role in the early development of cognitive function. As noted in the Washington Post

“What skill in language-impaired children is this gene affecting?” said Dr. Karin Stromswold, author of an editorial accompanying the paper in the Nov. 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. “There are a lot of reasons you can be language-impaired, excluding hearing loss and mental retardation.”

Many children with common language impairment also have motor impairment, so the gene could actually be affecting either core language or motor involvement, said Stromswold, a professor of psychology and member of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, in New Brunswick, N.J.

In their paper, the researchers suggest that “different components of autistic-spectrum disorders (communication deficits, impaired social interaction, and rigid or repetitive behaviors) may be under different genetic influences.”

Another study about autism genetics appears in the Journal of Medical Genetics and (as noted in the November 5th Vancouver Sun) suggests that disruptions in the gene, Contactin 4, stop the gene’s proper functioning and prevent the brain from making proper networks through the development of axons; the mutations are present from birth. 92 patients from 81 families with autism spectrum disorder participated and a whole genome analysis performed, and the results compared them to 560 people without autism. Three of the patients were found to have deletions or duplications of DNA that disrupted Contactin 4. In all the cases, these disruptions were inherited from fathers without a history of autism.

Phonagnosia is the inability to recognize voices, yesterday’s Science Daily reports. A case study published in Neuropsychologia reports on “KH,” who is

……unable to recognise people by their voice, including her own daughter whom she has great difficulty identifying over the phone. The woman, known as KH, avoids answering the phone where possible, and for many years has only answered ‘booked calls’. KH books calls with friends or co-workers, so she knows who to expect when the telephone rings at a certain time. In the 1980s, KH had a job in which she introduced herself with a different form of her first name so she would know that it was someone related to her job when they called and asked for her using that name.

Charlie doesn’t say so much using words so it’s not so easy to know what he’s thinking and there’s a tendency to assume that his limited speech means his understanding of what others say is equally limited. He always turns his head or looks up or hums in a different tone when he hears the sound of Jim’s or my voice and certain voices (high-pitched and sounding like LaaLaa, the yellow Teletubby) seem to grate on him.

Jim reminded me that Charlie’s own voice will be changing sooner than soon—so we’ll be having to adapt to the sound of a new voice.

Charlie and I caught the PATH train in Jersey City and got off at 23rd Street in Manhattan. We usually take it all the way to the end at 33rd Street where we catch a subway up to where Jim’s office is near Lincoln Center and get some dinner together but Friday night was different. Philosopher Ian Hacking, Professor Emeritus of the College de France, was giving a lecture on How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism as a keynote lecture for a conference, Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy. The conference’s stated aim was to explore

philosophical questions about three specific populations — people with autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and those labeled “mentally retarded”

with those questions specifically being:

Personhood: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the protections and responsibilities we assign to “persons”? Do the implications of such exclusion force a reconsideration of the concept of personhood?

Justice: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the claims and protections granted to members of a political community? If not, how might their interests be represented and given a political voice?

Care: How should we define, and how can we recognize, relationships and obligations to people lacking the ability to fully care for themselves? How should we understand the obligations of and to their caregivers? What significant aspects of the nature of all human interaction are revealed in these relationships?

History and Conceptual Bases of Classifications: How have various categories of cognitive disability emerged? What historical, social and political contingencies have played a part in our classifications?

Metaphilosophical Concerns: How has the “benign neglect” philosophers have exercised with respect to this subject shaped the substance of wider philosophical theory and practice?

Prof. Hacking looked at recent autobiographies by autistic persons as well as “parental biography, fictions, stories for children, and above all blogs,” to argue that these perform “an essential part of transforming the conception that severely autistic people lead ‘thin’ emotional lives into a vision of a far richer mode of existence.” Writings by Temple Grandin, by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, by Daniel Tammet, and by Donna Williams were discussed. Prof. Hacking reflected on how such narratives by autistic writers serve as a sort of antidote to the notion that autistic individuals have “thin” interior lives.

A question posed to the audience was in reference to those “severely” autistic individuals who do not have the linguistic ability too communicate as do Grandin, Mukhopadhyay, and others. How, it was asked, can one find out if such individuals have not “thin” emotional lives, but “thick” ones (if I am rephrasing a very small portion of Prof. Hacking’s lecture accurately)?

It’s a question that arises constantly, if in different form, in my mind. I feel I’ve learned a lot from reading books by all four authors and, too, blogs by autistic authors (more than a few of whom are on the Autism Hub). It’s learning with a practical and immediate application for me, Charlie’s language being so limited, though his communication, and specifically his communicative intent, is rich and constant. It’s a matter of knowing what to look for, to know how to “read” what Charlie does and how he responds to the world around him. It is an interpretative act—-I’m like a detective trying to crack the code of what Charlie is doing, putting his hands over ears or twisting his right thumb in his shirt, or singing a bit of a certain melody. Life with Charlie has suggested to me that we perhaps puts too much value in language to understand each other; that we tend to overlook that just being with each other builds and fosters an intuitive, wordless, communication. Words are just the beginning.

Jim met Charlie and me as walked down 27th Street. I said a fast good-bye and Jim took Charlie back to get dinner and to go to his office. Charlie looked back at me, briefly, and was (Jim said) very eager to be in Jim’s office. I heard a good part of the lecture, the respondent, asked a question, and met some old and new faces and then went out into the night. I sighted Jim and Charlie standing in an island off of 32nd Street and Broadway, Jim craning his neck to see me amid a mass of teenagers and twentysomethings, Charlie with his hood over his head, Leapster in the crook of his arm, and standing sideways. We immediately went back underground to catch the PATH train.

Jim explained how Charlie had gotten sushi but just poked at it, preferring some fresh spring rolls (yes, Charlie seems to have a preference for Asian food) and trying a piece of cake. “Blue,” said Charlie and put his hand into my bag. He pulled out a book and set it on the seat, and then fished in the front pocket. I handed him two pens, first a black one and then a blue, and Charlie held these (along with one he’d taken from Jim’s desk) all the way back to Jersey City and down Kennedy Boulevard as we walked back to the black car.

He held onto them very tightly, and they were still in his hand when he went to bed, after we came home.

A simile, as my students are quick to tell me, is when you’re comparing something to something else and you use “as” or “like.” It’s a comparison of something by way of mentioning something else, and the “‘as’ or ‘like’” makes it very clear what you’re up to.

“Simile” is the title of one of my favorite poems from Line Dance (Word Press 2008) by Barbara Crooker:

My son showd me his paper from remedial
English; he was supposed to fill in the blanks.
Cool as a __________.
Smooth as a __________. Neat as a _____.

He came up with: angry as a teakettle
and when I asked, “Why?” said,
“Because it was boiling mad.” Of course,
it was marked wrong, one more red mark
in his life’s long test.

When I called from Virginia to ask him
what he did last weekend,
he said, “We bought Italian salad dressing.”

Last fall we went to a Broadway
play; what he liked the most
were traffic lights and Don’t Walk signs.

Of, my little pork chop, my sweet potato,
my tender tot. You have made me pay attention
to the world’s smallest minutia. My pea-shaped
heart, red as a stop sign, fills with
the helium of tenderness, thinks it might burst.

Crooker is the mother of an adult autistic son and a couple of poems (such as “Climbing the Jade Mountain,” quoted at the end of this post) in Line Dance are about him. Crooker being a poet, and  (like me) the mother of an autistic son who struggles especially to use words, I sense in “Simile” a certain feeling of intertwined sadness and tenderness—-linked with “helium” in the poem’s last line, and potentially explosive. Crooker’s fine attentiveness to the power and nuance of words is ever, implicitly, in quiet contrast to her son’s different way of being-in-language, in which one is “angry as a teakettle” because “it was boiling mad,” an answer evoking a certain kind of poetry of its own. An answer that is marked simply wrong, in red.

Language is, you might say, my bread and butter. I teach two languages (”dead” ones, all right, and so perhaps all the more “foreign”). I translate poetry from both (Latin more, and Virgil in particular) and sit across from undergraduates trying to turn vocabulary words and grammar into a coherent sentence. And, like Crooker, my son is autistic and language is not a medium he is readily conversant in, is perhaps not at all comfortable in. My son does speak, mostly in phrases of a few words recalling a telegraph’s message. It’s mostly the names of things—nouns—and their attributes–adjectives—and a few very literal verbs (eat, drink, want) that he says on his own.

Charlie has plenty to communicate, it should be so obvious. I learn what that might be from something very simple: We (Charlie, Jim and I) spend a lot of time together, on many good adventures (to the beach on Sunday) and for many mundane humdrum moments. Trips to Target to buy paper towels and detergent. Walks down the clean-swept, anonymous main street of our condo complex. Waits in waiting rooms where Charlie has grown too old for the toys and I’ve already read all the autism, special need, and special diet books on the shelf.

It’s a lot of dad-mom-Charlie together time. There aren’t soccer teams or JV football practice or swim team tryouts, or general hanging around with friends, or all the other things “typical” kids do. “Not just any babysitter” can watch Charlie, and we’re excessively choosy about who might. People look too long or look deliberately elsewhere on knowing there’s someone so very different in their midst; someone who doesn’t seem so like them.

While it can get wearying to keeping dealing with all that, I’ve also found that I get better at, truly and really, not letting it bother me. One reason is because I’m too busy talking with, relating to Charlie, and what others are thinking is of no consequence. And honestly, I more and more feel at my most relaxed when I’m with Charlie. Life with our boy is not a continuous stream of harried moments of late; it’s rich and busy and we do tend to do the same things over and over, and yet there’s plenty going on, plenty to learn and do.

Charlie has had and has a lot of challenges and struggles in the behavior department. Some like to go into more detail about all matters “kaka“—that’s ancient Greek for “bad things”—I can assure that we’ve seen and smelled our share of plenty. Nonetheless never would or have we thought that h would be better to be dead rather to be autistic. This very notion was the subject of a post yesterday on Left Brain/Right Brain and such a statement seems to me, in rather classical terms, a statement of hubris. Hubris describes a kind of over-arching pride and self-confidence, the sort of too-great faith that a human—even a hero, like a king or noble in a Greek tragedy—can have, and this pride can breed a kind of defiance and blind one to the truth and the reality before one’s eyes. (Such pride is the flaw in the character of Oedipus, King of Thebes, in Sophocles Oedipus Rex).

Saying that death is better than autism suggests a one-dimensional understanding of autism and of autistic persons. Jim and I have never been able to consider that vaccines or mercury or any of that had something to do with “making” Charlie autistic: A shot didn’t make Charlie Charlie.

My son has done and does some really tough things. Really tough things. There was a time we feared we would not be able to keep him with us at home, that we could not take care of him anymore, could not help him. I think these sorts of terrible, difficult feelings and thoughts drive some or many or most or maybe all of the 5000 or so petitioners in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and lead them and a whole cast of others (certainly including some lawyers) to, as Kathleen Seidel on Neurodiversity points out, go to some great, great lengths. I also think the claims of a vaccine-autism link will one day seem like so much history when this hypothesis of autism causation is put to rest, after a protracted existence.

Somedays I’m just grateful that Charlie’s with us, and what’s he not able to do and what he’s able to do is so much (as Jim likes to put it) gravy. Monday night after swimming and shopping and a big dinner, Charlie was sitting on a floppy cushion chair (that happens to be personalized with his name in white stitching). Jim was working late and I was finishing my dinner when Charlie suddenly looked straight at me, and squinted his right eye, and said, “Stop it.” And, “stop it.” And, “stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. STOP IT.” Interspersed with “What’s the matter, Charlie? What’s the matter, Charlie?”

He was clearly agitated, the lines of his face drawn and troubled, and he said those two phrases over and over and over for several minutes. I believe I know where they are from: When Charlie was having immense trouble with head-banging, I’d say (what can you say) “stop it, just stop it.” (He did not.) The “what’s the matter Charlie?” was said to him at the school in the town we used to live in. Charlie was never able to answer with words. Somehow those old memories had gone live in him Monday night.

I sat across from him. I moved beside him and said “yeah.” I got up and sat on an old IKEA footstool. When Charlie paused from talking, I said something about taking deep breaths when you’re nervouse—a technique his teacher has told me they have been teaching him—and Charlie said “breath” and breathed in and sat, quiet.

He was as quickly up and into his room, where he ran furiously back and forth across the floor and then started belly-flopping on his bed. I came in and sat on the floor and Charlie started saying the name of an old teacher (whom he’d had in our old town). I said the name of his current teacher and Charlie repeated her name and sat and buried his face in a fleece blanket. He lay down to go to sleep soon after that and I sat in a chair as we pulled his blankets around him and didn’t say anything in particular.

………..You have made me pay attention
to the world’s smallest minutia

——the sound of a boy peacefully breathing, asleep in his own bed on Superman sheets, safe at home.

No similes or metaphors or fanciful figurative language here—-just the depiction of what is, and it is good.

So as you may not, or may, have noticed, there is still some wonkiness going up with this blog. The good folks who handle are matters technological, software-related, and the like, have been working hard to migrate b5media’s blogs over to a new server and all should be well, webpages should load and updates occur, very soon. One (”adverse effect?“) of the server migration has been that the sidebar (to your right) has not been updating with recent posts and recent comments. So if a comment is left on a post written a couple weeks or months ago, unless you’ve decided to sit down and read every single post (which I don’t recommend; some posts are more post-worthy than others), some good comments will go missed. I’ve rounded up a few of them below, with a bit of my own responses, and many many thanks for everyone who reads Autism Vox and lets me know what you think.

Anatasia Hulke was found on Monday afternoon, after she’d been missing from her home since Thursday.Regan commented on a bulletin about educational policy from the National Down Syndrome Society and pointed out a Nova video about autism, genes, and a tale of two mice.

A post about late talking written in July continues to draw comments, including this one from John which argues that autism and other disabilities like dyslexia are currently over-diagnosed.

I would counter, they are being diagnosed more because we understand them more and can better identify them, and this notion of better diagnosis needs to be considered in investigating why the rates of autism in Somali children in Minneapolis have increased (here is a commenter, Ali, on this topic).

A commenter, Mindy, asked another commented about seizure medications, Sensory Processing Disorder in a post on sensible accommodations for sensory issues. A couple of friends have been talking on and off about the possibility of using medication for their children. My son’s been on medication since he was 7 and the decision to use it was not lightly made; the medications’ effects are carefully, continually scrutinized. (We’re going to visit Charlie’s pediatric neurologist on Friday to talk about this and some other things.)

The father of a teenage boy asked this question in a post on talking to oneself:

I’ve noticed my 16 yr old boy pace and talk to himself a few times. He is still a bit uncoordinated and has a tendency to walk looking down instead of his head up or stragit ahead. He has above average grades and excels in Japenese but he is a bit sluggish with physical acitivities. I’m a bit concerned becasue his mother (the ex) suffers from schizophrenia and his older brother devleoped a psychois at about 20 yrs of age but had bad grades and drug use may have contributed. Should I be concerned?

Some things I’d ask: Are the pacing and the looking down and the sluggishness long-time behaviors, or relatively new? Are these things affecting him in school or otherwise; does he generally seem happy and all right with things? If he only talking to himself, or also talking to others? Just some thoughts……

Another commenter, Jim Blair, asked me a question in the midst of a comment, quoted here in full; the original post was on prenatal testing (a topic of particular now because of whose youngest son, Trig, has Down Syndrome:

Kristina Chew says:

“And a life without Charlie is a life that neither I nor my husband Jim can imagine, nor would we want to.”

Hi,

Follow me in a hypothetical thought experiment. Imagine that your Charlie had been born a “perfect child” as seen by most people. Suppose he were to grow up to be–depending on your preference, an all star New York Yankee shortstop or Nobel Prize winning scientist. Call him Charlie II.

Would you then make the above quoted claim?

Now suppose that as the result of prenatal genetic testing Charlie I had been aborted and 6 month later Charlie II conceived. Think you would still choose the Charlie I that was never born to the Charlie II that was never conceived?

Of course not. Because we only know the things that ARE and not the things that might have been had we made different decisions.

I thank Jim Blair for taking the time to write out this thought experiment, though I find him to be a bit presumptive about how I would respond to his question. According to him, had I known via prenatal testing that Charlie (”Charlie I,” in the thought experiment) had autism, I would have chosen to abort him, thus making it possible for the conception and eventual birth of a most hypothetical “Charlie II” who would grow up to be an “all star New York Yankee shortstop or Nobel Prize winning scientist” and who, endowed with such an impressive future, would be a child that people would wish to have, and would indeed even consider to be a, if not the, perfect child.

I hope that Jim Blair keeps reading this blog (especially once the software issues gets resolved), as he will then find out why I know that Charlie is perfect and why there was no never any doubt in anyone’s mind that he, once conceived, would be born, and that whatever prior information Jim and I might have from prenatal genetic testing or other testing, we have always chosen to have him.

Always have, always will.

BTBR mice are an inbred mouse strain that provide a “mouse model of autism.” BTBR mice are transgenic (their DNA contains an extra human gene thought to be involved in autism) and display “social abnormalities and repetitive behaviors” that correspond to the first and second diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders. A recent study in PLOS One by Maria Luisa Scatton et al. investigates ultrasonic vocalizations in BTBR mice, in order to look at the second diagnostic criterion for ASDs, communication deficits. Scientists separately baby mice of different strains from their mothers and hypothesized that ultrasonic vocalizations might be a measure of social communication in the mice. As The New Scientist notes:

The pups, which had not yet opened their eyes, made noises aimed to bring mom back. These ultrasonic sounds � too low for the human ear to detect � come in 10 different types, from clicking to pure tones.

Most mice in the study used all 10 categories. But the vocabulary of one strain, called BTBR, was limited to four calls, focusing on “harmonics” that contain multiple, simultaneous sounds � like guitar strings plucked together. BTBR mice also called louder and for longer periods of time. “This is similar to what others have found in autistic infants,” says Scattoni.

Via The New Scientist is a clip of the sounds a BTBR mouse makes. A press release also notes this:

The reduced vocal repertoire in BTBR mice may be analogous to atypical vocalizations in some infants and young children later diagnosed with autism. Instead of cooing and babbling, some young children may hum or grunt for extended periods, fail to add inflections into speech patterns, repeat “pop up” words out of context, squeal stereotypically, and laugh inappropriately. Others may be very irritable, cry for long periods of time, and be difficult to console. More crying in these babies may be similar to the higher number of separation calls in BTBR pups.

And, as the authors of the study note, “Mouse pup calls incorporate some properties that suggest they could serve some of the same functions as the crying of human babies, especially their ability to elicit parental retrieval behaviors.”

Never having paid too much attention to repetitive patterns of squeaking in any mouse (like the large gray one that once walked into a glue trap in our old kitchen), I do note certain repeated sounds and frequences in the audio clip of a BTBR mouse vocalizing. But then, I am listening for certain sounds and patterns of sounds.

The “atypical vocalizations” in young children later diagnosed with autism that are considered similar to  those of the BTBR mice—humming or grunting “for extended periods, failing to ” inflections into speech patterns,” repetition of “‘pop up’ words out of context”—were features of Charlie’s communication when he was very young, and still can be heard today.It’s noted that researchers hope to use these findings in “identifying genetic and environmental causes of autism, and for evaluating proposed treatments.” But I’m wondering if the study also simply sheds some light about the non-verbal communication of autistic children. We strive constantly to encourage and improve Charlie’s talking, but we’ve also learned to tune in to his non-verbal communication, to his vocalizations. These are often musical, having a melody, rhythm, pitch, tone, phrasing. Charlie’s verbal communication is limited, but he is (and always has been) communicating, and in ways that we need to learn to listen to.

One mouse’s (boy’s) noise is saying something.

“Autistics” simply do not exist.

writes journalist Dan Olmsted in an Age of Autism post on the use of the word “retard” in the movie Tropic Thunder. He “really can’t stand” it when the “people with autism” are referred to as “autistics,” and he sees the word as a “corollary of ‘retards’.”

Olmsted refers here to an ongoing debate in the autism community, about whether to use the adjective “autistic” or the preposition/noun phrase “with autism.” Some prefer to say “autistic” to suggest that autism is part of a person; others prefer “with autism,” as it’s thought that this phrase suggests that autism is separate from a person. More recently, autistic adults and self-advocates (as on autistics.org) have been using the word “autistic” as a noun to describe themselves. Olmsted seems to think that using “autistics” to describe oneself is not the most appropriate and expresses a wish that persons who self-identify as autistic might “rethink the matter.”

Olmsted’s “best argument” for why it’s incorrect to use “autistics” as a noun is that

“In my Webster’s, at least, there is no such use of the word.”

Words’ definitions change and evolve over time; words acquire meaning and new meanings through common usage, well before they are added to dictionaries and become “official,” and one individual can hardly be the arbiter of accepted usage. As Olmsted is not himself (as far as I know) autistic/has autism, it seems that it might be well for him to leave this matter of semantics and nomenclature to others, and in particular to those who have chosen to say that they are, yes, autistic.

Today’s New York Times weighs in not so much about the movie Tropic Thunder’s use of the r-word, as on the more general phenomenon of certain Hollywood movies seeking to top levels of tastelessness and crassness, and un-PC-ness, all in the name of box office revenues.

The r-word is kind of r-rated around here and, indeed, just simply rude.

And a sign of a rube?