Hyperverbal Autists
When autism first started to be diagnosed, people thought of autistic people as nonverbal, or acquiring verbal skills slowly and haltingly. This stereotype still persists and is part of the reason why many autists are missed or dismissed, if they seem to have good verbal skills. Sometimes these autists are called “hyperverbal.” I feel like I want to make a Hannah Gadsby joke about this being a complete misunderstanding of “hyperverbal.” I had a lot of words, and I knew exactly what they meant — except that I didn’t. At all. Understand what words were for.
Being hyperverbal as a child often looks like a kid studying a dictionary (something I did with vigor — learning the longest word in the English language, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, in elementary school and being delighted to tell adults what it meant and how to spell it. Precisely. Being hyperverbal meant raising my hand to correct every teacher who misspoke and the other students, as well. Being hyperverbal meant reading way over my grade level for many, many years, with no one really asking me if I wanted to read The Three Musketeers when I was eleven or if I really understood what was going on in “To Build A Fire” at age ten. It meant being confused when people used language crudely and imprecisely, or when they made fun of me using words that did not make any sense to me.
I still struggle with metaphorical language as an adult. Oh, not when I know it’s in the context of literature. I was good at putting on my “literature” hat and seeing that poems were a different language mode. But metaphorical speech in everyday use was so difficult for me. And I still struggle because I correct non-precise speech in others and am frustrated because no one ever appreciates me for helping them out in this way. They are annoyed in just the same way that my third-grade classmates were.
The problem with being hyperverbal as a child is that it tends to confuse adults into thinking that you are “mature” (a common label applied to me as a child). I was not at all mature. I was thoroughly confused by everything that went on around me socially. I had no idea how to make friends, and wasn’t even sure what friends were or if I wanted any because friendship was so unfathomable to me. I liked spending time with adults because they tended to be more predictable and treated me kindly because I was, after all, a child. I also enjoyed feeling like spending time with the adults made me superior to other children, since this was the only time I felt not absolutely inferior and unacceptable socially.
Being hyperverbal isn’t really being better with language than others. It is a way of using language that isn’t typical. I loved words as a child because I believed they had a one-to-one correspondence to reality, and since I was always seeking out safety, words seemed safe. I could learn all the words and use them “properly” and that would make me a good human. When I was a little older, I began to learn other languages, because then I could find even more thoughts and ideas that I could attach to precise linguistic propositions.
But trying to use words to communicate with others when it wasn’t about facts or information — this is tricky. I love fiction and I write novels for a living. But that, too, is a kind of hyperverbalism. It’s a display of me doing it “right,” but I have all the time in the world to check things, ask editors if I’m getting the right effect. It’s not at all like real-time verbal communication, which is fast and just plain opaque to me. Most communication feels like it is ultimately a kind of mind-reading, which it turns out I’m very bad at, in part because my mind appears to be so different than other people’s.