DECEMBER 15, 2023 – In this age of self realization I’m finally at liberty to publicly acknowledge a condition, an affliction that has long clouded my otherwise happy existence: From childhood to geezerhood I’ve suffered from a form of aural dyslexia. That I’ve “suffered” is probably a gross overstatement—so much so that such a characterization is all the way facetious. The true nature of my malady is actually a source of amusement, especially to my spouse who began to notice something was “off” when our sons were old enough to have established age-appropriate vocabularies but were not yet schooled enough to be able to spell.
I think the first indication of a problem occurred this time of year when with our sons in tow we were running errands on a Saturday afternoon. We’d planned to stop at the mall where Santa was holding court, but we were otherwise falling behind. Given the anticipated wait time at the “North Pole,” Beth decided we’d have to postpone.
As was often the case, the decision gears inside her head turned silently. Without providing me with a contextual preface, she said, “I think we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to visit S-A-N-T-A.”
“Uh?” I replied. For the life of me I had no idea what word she’d just spelled. That she’d spelled it, I knew well enough, but beyond that, I was utterly clueless.
“S . . . A . . . N . . . T . . . A,” she said again, dragging it out so as to risk that Cory, a first-grader, could decipher it. But no kidding, I couldn’t stay focused on driving and at the same time arrange the sounded-out letters in their stated order.
“Are you kidding?” she asked, seeing nothing but continued puzzlement across my face.
“Let me try this,” she said, her tone betraying exasperation, “. . . S-C!”
“S-C . . .” I repeated the letters. The spinning gears inside my head finally engaged. “Oh! I get it,” I said.
Beth looked at me and shook her head as if she’d married an imbecile, which in a number of respects she had.
Alerted to my deficiency I became ever more aware of it. Shortly after the “S-A-N-T-A” incident, I heard Frank Sinatra’s version of “Jingle Bells” on the car radio. In the chorus sections, “Jingle” is spelled out, but do you suppose I could tell what the hell the mystery word was? No I could not.
Weeks later while Beth and I were driving somewhere without the kids, a recording of Aretha Franklin’s chart-busting song, R-E-S-P-E-C-T filled the inside of the car. And yes, what the reader is thinking would be impossible occurred nonetheless. Though I knew the song, knew the title, knew, for crying out loud, what Aretha was spelling out, I realized that the letters R-E-S-P-E-C-T made absolutely no sense to me. Yes, I could apprehend that she was spelling a word, and yes, I could hear the individual letters—especially the “R-E” and the “C-T,” but my brain simply could not put them together to spell “respect.”
Distracted by my more serious deficiencies as a co-parent, Beth soon dismissed my inability to untangle out-loud spellings. As circumstances necessitated, she continued to rely on the time-honored parents’ spelling code to communicate information that in the moment she didn’t want our sons to hear—words such as “bedtime” or “medicine.” I used context or feigned understanding to cover the fact I couldn’t translate spoken letters into spoken words.
Trouble returned, however, when Beth took to spelling out entire phrases. “We’ll have to S-K-I-P-I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M-C-O-N-E-S,” for example, to signal that a late departure for home from the Red Cabin at the end of a weekend meant we couldn’t stop at DQ.
What on earth was that? I thought, before uttering, “Uh?”
“It’s too late to S-T-O-P,” she said.
It took Cory less than a nano-second to say “stop” from the backseat, followed by, “You mean we can’t stop at Dairy Queen?”
Saved by the bell . . . er . . . our (then) second-grader’s spelling proficiency.
As the kids learned how to spell aurally, the code fell into disuse—to my considerable relief. As I aged and accepted the continual revelations afforded by ever-expanding self-awareness, I gave little thought to my “aural dyslexia.”
Fast forward to grandparenthood . . .
This time around, my wife and I are of far different persuasions from those that governed in our 30s. We realize, for example, that irrespective of desire and determination, we can’t fundamentally change people. Also, I can run, but I can’t hide. Apropos of spelling out loud, we both know I can’t. The corollary, of course, is that in the presence of our (now) second-grade granddaughter, Beth will nonetheless spell out words when necessary, and I’ll say, “Unless you just spelled ‘cat,’ which I don’t think you did, you’re going to have to write that down.” And we both laugh.
In writing this post, I wondered if a word exists for the aural version of “dyslexia.” I couldn’t find one, but with amusement I searched the phrase, “What do you call the inability to understand words spelled out loud?” I honestly didn’t think there was any explanation other than the one traditionally assigned to conventional (reading/writing) dyslexia: intellectual deficiency, as opposed to being challenged in a manner that has no bearing on one’s intelligence quotient.
Leave it to the internet as a source of unending surprise. On the Quora site, I found a posting that had over 15,000 views. It reads:
I definitely don’t have dyslexia, and I’m total rubbish if someone spells a word out loud to me. I’ve got a strong background in words through journalism and teaching, but you can stop me in my tracks by simply spelling out G-R-O-C-E-R-Y and then wait while I try to work out what word you’re spelling. And most likely I’m going to have to ask you to spell it at least one more time since by the time I’m halfway through I will have forgotten the rest of the letters.
The same is true of numbers. If you want me to write down a phone number give it to me slowly and in chunks of no more than three numbers at a time.
The author, one Christopher Simpson, is a Canadian with the profile, “Journalist, editor and 10 years teaching analytical writing to college students.” No dummy, I say as a matter of self-assurance.
Who woulda T-H-O-U-G-H-T?
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
