Multifarious Threads

I’m autistic. But what does that MEAN?

8th August 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

(content warning: including child sexual abuse, bullying, harassment, slavery, and exploitation)

I’m autistic. But that explains everything and nothing about me. I¹ am also thirty-five years old, live in a postage-stamp apartment with my eight-year-old tabby cat, and love cheesy pop music. I have a job I love, a circle of dear friends, and a community that has seen me through the best and worst of my adult life.

I don’t like writing much about myself; I’d rather write about my work and what I’m interested in. I don’t actually crave the spotlight, but I feel I’ve been thrust there just to make myself understood. I am also aware that I may sound like a self-narrating zoo exhibit, though I try to avoid this. I am not Temple Grandin, Daniel Tammet, or Stephen Wiltshire. I am not Social-Justice Rain Man; I am not your fucking inspiration. I am not a computer, and I am most certainly not your computer, not a flesh-and-blood Siri, Cortana, or Alexa. I’m just human. And since I want to just be human, I don’t talk very much about myself. But I’m going to try today anyway.

I hear of concepts that imperfectly describe what I see and feel: hyperlexia, savant syndrome, autism, Pervasive Developmental Disorder. But I could understand what I read as a child unless I was dissociating and couldn’t focus. I don’t have an intellectual disability. And what do you make of someone whose development is delayed in some ways, advanced in others, and utterly normal in still others? The other ones are no improvement: “gifted” smells of the schoolroom or the psychic’s booth, and in any case, I associate it too much with shitty elitist educational policies. “Asperger syndrome” is all wrong; I associate it with “Aspie supremacists” and autistic people who are more abstract than sensory—I’m both. Just “autistic” won’t work, either, because there are different kinds of autism. And “twice-exceptional”? What the hell does that even mean? And I’ve often felt more exceptionable than exceptional, anyway. One of my high-school teachers compared me to Temple Grandin, but I didn’t really make the connection; I thought I was just weird².

I don’t talk much about my internal experiences because my abilities are verbal and symbolic; I’m not a human calculator, musical prodigy, or virtuoso painter³. Because I can filter what I say with words, I understate just about everything. I also worry about being believed, even though I know others with overlapping experiences.

Imagine what it would feel like if the words, numerals, ideas, and other symbols that you hear and read had feelings, shapes, sounds, emotional associations, historical references, textures, personalities, and smells—and you feel them almost as acutely as you do your normal senses. This is ideasthesia, which I have in excess. Ideasthetes process abstractions as concrete sense data. For me, words and symbols call up visual, spatial, emotional, historical, textural, and auditory impressions. Ideasthesia makes me a good writer and designer, but it’s also painful for me to see bad typography, misspelled words, punctuation errors, and poorly matched patterns.
When I read my friends’ words on my computer or phone, it feels as though they’re physically there—I feel their personalities, energy, texture, and emotions. That alone makes it all worth it.
What some see as abstractions—racism, poverty, discrimination—I see as embodied realities. Not only because of my own experiences with marginalisation, which are legion, but also because I actually feel them. Racism is my enslaved ancestors shackled together as they are forcibly repatriated to an alien world. Fingers being sliced off for learning how to read. I think of my sharecropper great-great-grandparents bent over double, picking tobacco in the humid Carolina heat. Demonstrators with calloused feet, sweaty brows, and determined faces holding signs saying, “I AM A MAN.” It’s Blind Tom Wiggins, a kindred spirit from another age, exploited and manipulated and treated as a curiosity. Though his talents were different from mine, there’s a pleasing familiarity in his perceptual acuity—and the plaint of someone who hasn’t been allowed to be a someone. And it’s my being followed around stores, constantly being asked, “Can I help you find anything?” It’s the inexpressible fear of becoming the next George Floyd or Mike Brown if I walk down the wrong street on the wrong day at the wrong time. I don’t want to become a hashtag I’ll never be able to read. When I see Black Lives Matter signs, I start welling up a little. I’m grateful for the acknowledgment that my life does matter, but I’m also angry that it’s taken this long for people to say it.
My verbal thoughts are in complete sentences, using standard syntax, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Sometimes I can even choose a font for my thoughts. I can also read fluently in my dreams.
Symbols can be heard, tasted, befriended, felt, touched, heard. My ideasthesia is a kind of animism: facts and words and dates and numbers are alive. This is part of why I’m so fanatical about spelling—I’m not upset at the person making a mistake, but I am upset to see an impostor instead of the word I expected. A misspelled word is like a misspelled name. I try to be patient with people, but that’s hard when errors in spelling, punctuation, diction, and usage are saws, lawnmowers, and fireworks going off in your ears. If I’ve ever snapped at you because of an error that set off my internal alarm bells, I’m sorry.
Minute details in people’s speech, writing, and actions weave themselves into larger patterns—my brain seems to have created wetware algorithms. They’re not always perfect, but they’re reliable enough. When I point out the details that helped me identify the pattern, people are incredulous: “Why are you acting this way?” “What’s the matter with you?” “Why do you care so much?” Because those minutiae add up, and if I see certain things constantly going together, I’m going to draw an inference. If you’ve ever sincerely asked why I feel so strongly about things, thank you. Your asking showed that you cared.
I project myself into concepts I want to understand thoroughly. I was never able to understand the idea of derivatives and integrals in calculus until I jumped into the problem, so to speak. For differentiation, I saw myself in a freeze-frame animation moving along a curve. For integration, it was several versions of me superimposed on one another on a single point on that curve.
I have many intense interests, but my primary one is humanity: who we are, what we do, and what we can become. It’s easier to blend in when you’re doing what everyone else does by talking and using symbols. Because of that, I think people understand me all right most of the time, but I’m always steeling myself for quizzical looks when my thought processes reveal themselves unexpectedly.
I remember a lot of things that most people forget. It’s not as severe as full-blown hyperthymesia—I can use my long memory for practical ends—but some aspects are similar. I don’t consciously choose to remember those details. At times I like having all these memories; at others, I’d prefer to forget them. I have PTSD, anxiety, and clinical depression, so it’s sometimes torture.

Although I’ve become more comfortable over time with my being autistic, it’s difficult to cast off all the accumulated shame: shame for existing, shame for being “too much,” shame for seeing things differently from most people, shame that I could never make myself easily understood no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t help that my parents were emotionally and sexually abusive. They are homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, self-hating, deeply traumatized, hard-right evangelical Republicans who would vote for a flaming pile of shit if it had an R next to its name.⁴ They exploited my mind, body, and dignity for their own perverse and self-interested ends. I was treated like a card catalogue, Google Translate, a RealDoll, a pet—never like a person. Some abuse memories are filmlike flashbacks, but other incidents linger only as bodily memories, intrusive sensations, fears whose cause I’ve long forgotten. I suspect that my parents treated me the way they did for a few reasons: they isolated me to avoid reports to Child Protective Services, they have their own intense internalized ableism, and they simply didn’t know what to do with me. Although I can understand the last two reasons—I was doubtless difficult to raise—nothing in their past or present can excuse what they did to me. I hope they’ve never harmed any other child in their care.

On top of that, I grew up in a military family, where change is constant and stillness is brief. We moved every three to four years, going from state to state to country to country. (I have an especial dislike for jargon and alphabet soup because of all this; I can’t help thinking of all the military acronyms and initialisms—DoDDS, DEERS, PCS, TLF, BDUs, MREs, AFB.) Like other Air Force households, ours was organized as a strict hierarchy; we all had to know our place. Although my father was said to be at the top of this hierarchy, my parents shared power more equally than they would admit. Children were to be seen and not heard—or at least not heard too loudly. This is why I both need and fear attention: I want to be around people who also want to be around me, but I’m also terrified that if I stick my neck out, it’ll get chopped off.

Military families often organize themselves like units and battalions; individuality is subordinated to unit cohesion, family cohesion, national cohesion. Unquestioned obedience is the norm. You may be incoherent on the inside, but you’d better look sharp regardless. This may work for the troops, but it’s no way to raise a child. It was no great feat for eleven-year-old me to empathize with the characters in The Giver and Nineteen Eighty-four: these dystopias were just military-base life intensified ⁵. Of course Winston Smith was easy pickings for the Thought Police; he yearned for humanity in a world that despised the individual. I am terrified of a world shorn of all beauty, sense, and purpose—not surprising for a Technicolour child who grew up in a monochrome world of brown-and-tan buildings, impersonal bureaucracy, uniforms and uniformity. When I see people treated as numbers, I recoil—you won’t be remunerated well in the military, but you will be well enumerated.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

(That boot is my father’s.)

I ran away from my parents when I was twenty years old and never looked back. I knew everything was all wrong; I could never love Big Brother. I shudder to think of what might have become of me—if there’d still be a me—had I not known people who were kind enough to help me flee. I celebrate the day I left—10 October 2006—as my “observed birthday.”

I pity my parents, but I can’t forgive them, despite all the indoctrination I heard as a child. Even if the abuse were emotional only, even if my parents’ evils were limited to shouting and belittling and isolation, they were evil nonetheless. There’s always a chance that your child may be an extreme statistical outlier. Improbable is not impossible, and people like me will always break ostensibly airtight statistical models. I am a statistical outlier, so I push against the reduction of incommensurable human life to statistics and figures⁶. (The universe is a troll, though, so I ended up studying sociology and public policy. My apologies to my statistician colleagues—you do good work! Just remember that people like me exist, too.)

I make connections that others don’t, but much of what we take for granted started out as those connections. Let’s consider language. It’s all around us, so we see it like air or water. People see and hear language as marks on pages or arbitrary sounds that are mere vessels of meaning. But let’s look at that a little more: natural languages use concrete descriptions to refer to abstract phenomena. Comprehension means grasping together. Description means writing down. To discover is to remove something from its hiding place. The words idea, wit, and vision are cognate—in the Indo-European languages, sight is the primary metaphor for knowledge. I suspect that the first users of language were ideasthetes. Our languages would be very different if they weren’t.

(This is why doctrinaire descriptivism fills me with existential terror—the model seems to neglect those of us who do see, hear, and feel spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage as sensory stimuli. What are you doing, you monsters! You’re letting people hurt my friends.⁷ I can’t abide their sanguine predictions of radical linguistic change that we can never control—or their blasé attitudes toward so many of the things I find abhorrent. But I suspect they may think the opposite about us. How dare they change the flow of language? It’s its own phenomenon, and we’re foolish to change it. Being swallowed by the indifferent crowd, being laughed at for caring about style or beauty, being told that feelings and culture don’t matter—this is nightmarish, not reasonable. It just reminds me of my parents, the military, and the hell of my childhood. Apathy is the mother of dullness, so I resist it at every opportunity.)

This is one of the most difficult things I’ve written, since I bristle at the idea of showing too much vulnerability, too much sadness, fear, and trauma. But I’ve done a lot of difficult things this year—in the past six months, I’ve left a toxic nine-year relationship, started living alone for the first time after years of sharing with housemates, and started processing more of my trauma—so why not do another difficult thing?

I see my friends’ and colleagues’ faces as I write this, and hope you’ll understand what I’m talking about, at least a little. I do this for you, and I do this for everyone like me who feels alone in an intense, chaotic, and often frightening world.

I wish I’d known someone to show me the way when I was growing up. (I think I taught myself so much because there was nobody around to teach me.) I couldn’t understand how I was making connections others couldn’t see, even though they were as real as breathing.

But all of us, whether neurotypical or neurodivergent, rely on connections—social, symbolic, physical, mental, intellectual. Some of us make those difficult connections naturally. Others have to be shown the way. But all of us can make connections, at least a little bit—because that’s what makes us human.

Really, “I” is a misnomer; I’m just using it for your convenience. (I do a lot of things for people’s convenience.) ↩
It gives me a chill up the spine, though, to think that I was on a discussion panel with her last year. Over Zoom, of course. ↩
I am an artist, but I’m just good, not great. ↩
Donald Trump would qualify. ↩
(Lois Lowry, who wrote the Giver quadrilogy, was a military brat, too; I wonder whether it had an influence on the series.) ↩
I owe an intellectual debt to the late Jacques Barzun, who deplored what he called the “Stat Life.” It’s a recurring theme throughout his œuvre. ↩
I hate their constant mutilation of all right, one of my calming phrases. I repeat it to myself, all right, all right, all right. It’s a grounding mechanism: all will right itself. Two words, not one. Alright, on the other hand, is a false sense of security, a dissociative haze, a repugnant mixture of gloppy processed cheese and rancid vegetable oil that sticks in my throat. Allright is just a car crash that I can’t stop staring at. I hate seeing words wrongly run together—alot, aswell, atleast, eachother, and the like. They’re colliding into each other! Or maybe they’re like enmeshed couples who really need to break up for their own good. ↩

Wordsight

7th August 2021 by Finn Gardiner 1 Comment

(the word “Wordsight” written on a dusty-blue background)

In a word I see the world.

Written symbols—not just words, but letters, punctuation, essays, books, numerals—have personalities, sounds, histories, friends, enemies, parents, siblings, colours, shapes, moods, textures, and rhythms; they’re not just marks on a page. Eight is smug. Seven is yellowish. The letter M is a mulberry colour. Glamor for glamour is shabby. Esthetic for aesthetic is foul. COVID-19 shouts its name like a metallic-voiced Dalek; Covid-19 merely says it; covid-19 has lost its proper-noun status and is now a commonplace like flu or the common cold. The semicolon is pensive; the comma diligent and dutiful. When double quotation marks encase a full stop or comma, they look like grasping claws.

When I think in language, I think in complete written sentences; this writing usually appears as subtitles, lettering, handwriting, typography, or plain text on a screen, depending on the context. I see every word, punctuation mark, and numeral I hear. I can’t listen to most hip-hop and rap because I see all the lyrics in my head, and I don’t want the words to crowd out my own thoughts. Sometimes the head-text is animated, appearing in sequences like transitions on TV.

I suspect all this is a form of synaesthesia. The Germans have a word for the phenomenon: Sprachgefühl, a visceral sense of the language. For me, the Gefühl, the feeling, is very literal. But Sprachgefühl is a pair of Teutonic plates rubbing against each other. I want an English word to match an English feeling—wordsight.

When words are misspelled, malformed, or misused, I feel it: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, the beginnings of nausea building up in my throat. Keening voices, bits of metal scraping against each other, dentists’ drills, blaring sirens. “Your not coming too, are you?” Sandpaper and knives pressed into the skin, over and over again. “Save money everyday.” SCREEEEEEECH! Irregardless is rocks tumbling down a cliff. Corona virus feels too loose. Core competencies, stakeholders, impactful, best practices. Thunk, thunk, thunk. The excrescent S in anyways buzzes in my ears. Context weaves itself in, as its derivation suggests: Ugh, wrong word. Did they not know better? Argh! Why don’t they look it up? Do they not care? Where did they go to school? Is this a new trend? They ought to check the style manual. What are they doing? STOP IT! Ouch. Ouch, ouch, OUCH. I see words being mutilated, smashed together, torn apart, hacked to pieces, turned into Frankenstein’s monsters. If I come out strongly against a word or phrase, it’s probably because I can feel its repugnance in my very skin. When I’m especially sensitive, I can’t even look at the word, phrase or sentence without immediately averting my eyes.

The right words, on the other hand, are old friends. “Hello there! Oh, it’s you.” They’re a warm bath, a weighted blanket lying across my lap, a purring cat sitting next to me. To see the right words in the right places, with apologies to Jonathan Swift, is an ineffable delight. I hope always to feel that flutter of familiarity when I’m reading.

I calm myself by looking at friend-words. Seeing all right makes me feel… all right. I trust its sturdiness, the weight of a smooth stone in each of my hands. The space between the words allows for possibilities; it gives me just enough breathing room. Its second cousin, on the other hand, feels artificial, plasticky, like a false sense of security. It’s claustrophobic in there. I don’t feel soothed when I’m told that everything will be “alright.” It feels insincere, even if the writer meant it wholeheartedly. It’s nauseating, like being force-fed Velveeta, high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified vegetable oil, or some other lab-created concoction with a chemical aftertaste. It’s creepy, gooey, clingy, gloppy, cloying, inconsiderate, insistent. I can imagine a trademark sign after it. “You don’t need that stuffy old All Right any more. Try new Alright™! If you act now, you can get an Alot® and an Aswell® free! That’s right, an Alot® and an Aswell®! What an AMAZING offer! Call 1-888-AL-RIGHT. That’s 1-888-AL-RIGHT. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next thirty seconds, you can get an Afterall™ too! That’s right, folks, an Afterall™ as well—or should I say Aswell®?” It certainly doesn’t feel all right. Alright—and similar nonwords like alot and irregardless—are also a reliable marker of word-blindness. Those who write them tend to have a more tenuous relationship with words and their structure; although they intend no harm, they have no idea of the pain they inflict.

Symbols, like people, can be known by the company they keep. Some tend to lurk together in murky places, avoiding the light; others are bright and gregarious. Some hang out together in dark corners; others may prefer a smart dinner party. Some are romantics who seek others of their kind; others are technicians who cannot abide the romantics’ woolly imprecision. (I, for my part, try to be a romantic technician, or a technical romantic.)

I feel the difference between words that are similar, but not the same: comprise and compose, lay and lie, all together and altogether. Comprise is lighter than compose. All together is languid; altogether a little hectic. I can sometimes work out the derivation of a word by feeling it. When I think I’ve found a connection, I feel a little warm, but I don’t let myself go warm entirely—what if it’s a false etymology, a mere areal feature rather than a verifiable kinship? When I learn that the words are indeed akin, there’s a frisson down my back: I’ve discovered part of the chain. Anglo-Saxon words are warmer, woodier, more knobbly; French-derived ones are cooler and silkier; Latin ones grandiose and haughty.

I occupy myself with spelling because in English at least, it reflects history, culture, or writers’ tampering, whether inadvertent or deliberate. Our words are palimpsests, leaving traces of the influences that have come before. This is why I object so strongly to American spellings in British books: the written words’ texture, shape and patterns are wrong for the rhythm of the text. To misspell a word is to call it by the wrong name.

With all this sensation, there’s no wonder that I react with horror when someone expresses indifference to how symbols are used or arranged or written. “How can you not tell the difference between these two typefaces?” “And how could you use Arial when Helvetica came installed on the computer too?” “Don’t you want to match the personality of your writing with the way the letters look?” “How could you spell it that way? That looks broken.” “Break those words back up.” “Why did you split this word apart?”

Perhaps the first creators of language knew this, too. This is part of why I look askance at hardline descriptivists; language is too metaphorical, too alive, to exist without human design. After all, language is a system of metaphors that we use to share our thoughts with others. Metaphor means to carry across, as do transfer and translation (from Latin ferre, past tense tuli, past participle latus). We carry across our meanings to one another. But when words are merely data points in a larger pattern of use, it’s hard to appreciate the roles of sensation, emotion, and history. The scientist of language may see words as an object of analysis, but word-blindness will stop her perceiving their sensory effects.

Wordsight is both burdensome and fortunate, but I cannot imagine my life or career without it.

Position Statement on the ASAN Open Letter

19th June 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

(long form of this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/phineasfrogg/status/1406307615605411846)

I signed the open letter to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s board of directors to point out that ASAN has a lot of work to do on ensuring racial equity and including people with intellectual disabilities. I think ASAN senior staff want to do the right thing, but more work needs to be done.

Of the personal conflicts among board members, I know little, and of the brouhaha over “Autistic, Typing,” I know nothing—I have used social media infrequently over the past few months. I hold no animus against Ari Ne’eman, Sarah Kapit, or any of the other board members mentioned in the letter—again, I signed the letter only to highlight areas in which ASAN must improve. I’ve always had a collegial relationship with Ari and Sarah, and I’ve never been at the board meetings to draw any substantive judgment from them.

I’ve asked the original signatories to edit the letter to clarify that my involvement is to advocate racial equity, cross-disability inclusion, and transparency, not to sign on to any personal grievances. No more, no less.

Me, too.

7th April 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

(content warning: child abuse, incest, filicide, ableism, anti-LGBTQ discrimination)

I am almost thirty-five years old, and I am deathly terrified of my own mother.

It’s especially painful at springtime, when Autism Parents™ are praised for their sacrifices and devotion to their difficult “children with autism.” The deification of Autism Parents doesn’t just annoy me; it horrifies me. Not every parent of an autistic child is a saint—some are downright monstrous. The most obvious examples are the filicidal parents who think that it’s better to have a dead child than an autistic child.

But in many cases, we’re put in situations in which we’re still alive and wish we weren’t. That was me. My parents were not good parents—ARE not good parents. We have been estranged for almost fifteen years. I severed contact with my parents in 2006 because of their psychological abuse and knee-jerk anti-LGBTQ ideology. Growing up was often chaotic and miserable, but I dissociated it all away. I was screamed at, humiliated, degraded, alienated, ridiculed, belittled, and objectified. People who spoke to my parents told me that they talked about me as though I were an object, a piece of furniture, not a sentient human being. I was convinced that my parents were kind, loving, and thoughtful, and I was just a difficult child. After all, I was—am—autistic. It didn’t help that my parents, especially my mother, ran hot and cold, so I never knew where I stood; the ground under me was always shifting.

Recently, I figured out that the abuse I experienced went beyond the psychological. I’m scared to mention this, as though I’ll be hauled into my parents’ bedroom for questioning as I was when I lived with them.

I didn’t know that it went that far because I thought what happened was normal. In my household, children were effectively property. We were extensions of the couple, not people with rights, feelings, or opinions of our own.

So I thought showering with my mother starting at the age of nine, even when I’d showered by myself for several years, was normal.

I thought it was normal for mothers to make constant sexual jokes with their adolescent children.

I thought it was normal for mothers to comment about the smell of their teenage children’s crotches.

I thought it was normal for mothers to tell me to keep it down, or others would hear and think they were hurting me.

Mom’s M.O. was sanctimony on Sunday morning and sleaze on Sunday night.

I knew about child sexual abuse, but everything I read was about internet predators, strangers in creepy vans, and depraved coaches and uncles. I’d even heard about female perpetrators, but they were all teachers who’d assaulted their students—not mothers, and especially not long-suffering Autism Moms who had to deal with the excruciating burden of raising difficult children like me. Mothers and their children were supposed to have inviolable bonds with one another. People told me that my mother was the best friend I’d ever have.

I remember a conversation from when I was about nineteen, when Mom was worried I’d tell my friends online about my parents. She said that she was worried someone would come and kill them. My parents didn’t think words could have any lasting effect, so what was she afraid of? My mother would brag about me to her friends, but would be sure to badmouth me—in my presence, even, as though I weren’t there—to therapists and teachers. I suspect that she wanted to discredit me to any mandated reporter I might speak to. That bespeaks a guilty conscience, at least to me. If she thought she was doing everything right, there would be nothing to fear.

Even as I write this, I worry that I made it up, imagined it, just want to make excuses or something, that I somehow deserved it, that it was normal. But if I knew that this was happening to someone else, I’d get in touch with the relevant authorities. That’s how I know it’s wrong.

There was so much pressure for me to act as though my family were normal, even though I know I would have been horrified, even back then, to hear that someone else was treated the way I was. It seems obvious now—her creepy slasher-film smile, the crude jokes, the showers, the paranoia, her cold eyes—but it wasn’t back then. The abuse I went through was woven into my everyday life. I thought that all families were like this, or that I was uniquely deserving of such treatment.

This was not normal. This was not all right; this was not OK.

And most chillingly, I think she knew it; otherwise, she wouldn’t be so afraid. If she thought she was such a good parent, any accusations would just roll off. She must have known at some level that what she did was wrong.

This is part of why I am livid every time I see people glorifying Autism Parents™ without acknowledging that some don’t deserve the glory. There are a lot of good parents, but some of them are downright rotten—murderers, emotional abusers, child molesters, child batterers.

Mom, your reign of terror is over. I’ve been gone for almost fifteen years, and I haven’t regretted leaving for an instant. I’ve been homeless. I’ve been poor, isolated, unsure where the next meal is coming from or whether I’d be protected from the elements. I’m comfortable now, but even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t regret leaving, because I am no longer with you.

Baloney!

22nd March 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

Imagine that I’m at a restaurant—Chez Snob—that purports to offer haute cuisine.¹ After spending a few minutes looking through all the choices on the menu, I decide on a steak with herbed butter, duchess potatoes, asparagus, and a glass of Veuve Clicquot.

Several minutes later, the waiter shows up at my table, proudly presenting me with a bologna sandwich made with soggy Wonder Bread, off-brand American “cheese,” gobs of cloyingly sweet mayonnaise, a single piece of wilted iceberg lettuce, and a tasteless watery tomato slice. Instead of the glass of Veuve Clicquot I expected, I receive a half-empty cup of grape Kool-Aid.

“Excuse me? This isn’t what I ordered.” The waiter shoots me a withering look, claiming that this bait-and-switch is acceptable because the restaurant adheres to the principle of “descriptive gastronomy.”

“After all,” he says, “most people are more likely to eat bologna sandwiches than haute cuisine.”

“But, sir, that’s not what I ordered. If I wanted a bologna sandwich, I would have made one at home, but I don’t even like bologna. And I certainly wasn’t expecting grape Kool-Aid.”

“Are you trying to tell me that bologna sandwiches aren’t valid food, or that grape Kool-Aid isn’t a real drink? That’s just a classist prejudice.”

“That’s beside the point. Bologna sandwiches may be food, all right, but I didn’t come to your restaurant for bologna. Even if you’re serving those sandwiches ‘ironically,’ they’re not what I came for.”

As the waiter continues to prattle about the merits of descriptive gastronomy and my unconscionable prejudice against bologna sandwiches, I turn tail and walk out of the restaurant, reminding myself to post a bad review online once I’m back home.

Let’s imagine another restaurant: Big Momma’s Bar-B-Q. Unlike Chez Snob, Big Momma’s is honest. The cashier tells you that you’re going to get pulled pork with tangy barbecue sauce, collard greens, coleslaw, cornbread, and baked beans, and that’s exactly what you get—good old-fashioned down-home cooking, all served up in white polystyrene containers filled to bursting. No frills, no bullshit. But the descriptive-gastronomy fans conflate Chez Snob’s bait-and-switch bologna with Big Momma’s pulled pork and baked beans. I know what I’m getting at Big Momma’s, but Chez Snob is serving junk and presenting it as fine dining.

We can extend the analogy further: picture a “descriptive” car dealership that claims to sell Ferraris and Bentleys, but the only cars on the lot are beat-up Chevrolets and Toyotas, or a “descriptive” art-supply store that sells you discount-brand markers that go dry as soon as you open them instead of the Derwent pencils you asked for, because “more people use these than Derwent products.” The course description for a “descriptive” graphic-design class may promise to teach students professional techniques, but the professor decides to teach you how to make flyers in Microsoft Word instead, all set in Comic Sans, Arial, Algerian, Times New Roman, Curlz MT, and Impact. After all, regular people design flyers in Word using system typefaces.

Most people will see the absurdity of Chez Snob’s bologna sandwiches or Honest John’s Descriptive Dealership, but far too many think similar attitudes toward usage and grammar are acceptable. People with these attitudes have made a fetish of amateurism and mediocrity that would be unacceptable in most other fields. They claim to defend Big Momma’s soul food, but they’re just shilling for Chez Snob’s bologna sandwiches.

Don’t be hoodwinked into accepting weak writing, substandard spelling, and unsophisticated usage because of “descriptive grammar,” as I was for several years. I worried that if I didn’t share those views, I would be oppressive or excessively critical. Defending African American Vernacular English and other dialects from racist and classist attacks is the right thing to do, but that openness needn’t extend to editorial nuisances like between you and I, alot, dining at it’s best, apple’s $1/lb, miniscule, ad nauseum, and your not serious. All these are the products of confusion, carelessness, and inadequate education, not distinct cultural practices and norms. Nonjudgmental research practices are no cause to denounce editorial standards simply because untrained or poorly trained writers don’t adhere to them. That’s just baloney.

Let’s just pretend that COVID doesn’t exist for this scenario. ↩