What's the term in English to describe this kind of person?

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18 Mar 2009, 2:53 pm

"Jerk" would be the best word in Canadian or American English;
it has the same associations as the British word "w*ker" (i.e.
someone who gets his sexual jollies by masturbation) and carries
overtones of narcissism.

millie
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18 Mar 2009, 3:02 pm

Quote:

Greentea wrote:

I just posted a thread on another website forum asking why some people are so flippant, and it's interesting that out of nowhere, some of the posters started mentioning Asperger's, and saying that flippancy is the antithesis of Asperger's - as if they'd read my mind!

highly disputable Greentea. In fact I am shocked you would even post this, given the quality of your usual posts.

Flippancy can relate to impulsiveness and some autistic people are highly impulsive or appear to be so to others. Usually they are just following their own self driven internal logic that makes little sense to those around them.
I live my life like this - so much so that i cannot work with others.

THe value judgement that assumes flippancy is the antithesis of AS is very normal thinking. :wink:

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18 Mar 2009, 3:40 pm

Can people with AS be flippant? I know I can. In fact, I can be pretty sardonic in my humor. Do I like flippancy in others? Only if it's flippancy regarding someone besides me. If I was trying to tell someone something important and they were acting silly and flippant I might get annoyed. Yes.

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18 Mar 2009, 3:43 pm

Greentea: the character comes across to me as being Jovial, but that's just my initial reaction

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18 Mar 2009, 3:54 pm

Quote:

ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:

yes...and AS people can love double-entendres and word-plays.

it would depend on one's language skills i suppose.

You see, i read the initial post and really thought that it could be me as i can exhibit a slight case of verbal diarrhea and i am verbose at times and utterly boring. i have - in the past few years - learned cognitively that the "glazed over" facial expression means i need to stop talking. i am still slow to grasp it, but i can grasp it now.
not all autistic people are introverts and geeks.
My problem with foot in mouth disease has been huge in my life. I have been on national radio in my country and said things other people will not or do not say. oh well.

I find a thread on someone being offensive socially to be quite humorous on an autism forum -where half of us are probably lively and terribly loud and gauche aspie/autists who frequently suffer from insensitivity and foot in mouth disease.

in saying that, GReentea's threads are some of my faves to peruse.

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18 Mar 2009, 4:53 pm

I don't understand the antithesis part...sometimes I subconsciously gravitate toward the most unwarranted response. Probably comes off as at best, flippant, at worst, a tad bit malicious. I work on it by staying quiet, lol.

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18 Mar 2009, 5:14 pm

Quote:

ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:

i think it should be rehrased as "...antithesis to stereotypical aspie."

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18 Mar 2009, 5:24 pm

Greentea wrote:

That's true. It's quite the opposite of what we are able to do with words in real time. From the humor to the word play, to being able to intentionally reframe someone else's idea as something other than what they intended, that pretty much sums up what AS minds have a hard time doing, in one neat package.

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18 Mar 2009, 5:58 pm

Greentea wrote:

I've been looking for a term to describe a certain kind of behavior, a term that exists in Spanish but I don't know in English. The person I mean tends to be most of the time in a laughing mood, mostly laughing at others and at situations. They behave as if they were silly but they're not really silly. They tend to talk loudly and when asked a serious question they'll answer mocking the question (and indirectly, the person who asked it). They're mostly concerned with looking cool and unbothered by anything and looking down on everyone else with desdain except their close friends.

Eg:

A) I rescued a duckling from the ice covered lake and now it's at my house.
B) LOL you should cook it for dinner! LOL
A) I'm trying to learn about how to care for it till the spring, when he'll be able to go back to the lake...
B) Haha why don't you put it in the freezer so it starts getting used to winters? haha

A) So how did it go at the exam?
B) LOL I must've gotten a zero, I hadn't studied anything at all haha
A) Are you worried?
B) Don't worry be happy! Haha!

A) I heard you were in Europe for the holidays, did you have a good time?
B) Haha gootime, gootime! haha
A) What countries were you in?
B) All of them! LOL Just went chasing after each blonde that passed by hahaha LOL

How about jerk?

ruveyn

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18 Mar 2009, 6:18 pm

ruveyn wrote:

Greentea wrote:

How about jerk?

ruveyn

Now that ruveyn reposted this, it occurs to me that this is a kind of evasive social personality type that I think of as "Teflon". The guy is never truly serious and never really literal, so nothing sticks to him. He's like, got Teflon. And from his impenetrable breezy fortress, he avoids others.

The person might be trying to dodge a conversation with you, brush you off, in other words.

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18 Mar 2009, 7:09 pm

Actually, I mean really silly retorts, nothing creative at all. The main element is the disdainful mockery of someone or something and deviating the conversation away from anything even a tiny bit meaningful, as if mocking the very existance of things that are meaningful. Mocking anything that's even a tiny bit naive, innocent, genuine.

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18 Mar 2009, 7:15 pm

Quote:

Greentea wrote:

now i understand this.
i do not like disdainful mockery.
i do not like this at all.

i get what you are saying now that this is clarified.

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18 Mar 2009, 7:15 pm

ephemerella wrote:

Greentea wrote:

But it doesn't take a lot of effort to be flippant like the guy greentea quoted. Those retorts don't strike me as clever or witty at all.

Being a jerk is actually pretty easy if that's all you want to be. Next time you hear someone praising their favorite film or book make a scoffing gesture and tell them you thought it was stupid and pretentious. It takes more effort to come up with something intelligent and relevant to say than to be derisive and mocking towards everything.

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18 Mar 2009, 8:10 pm

I don't know how anyone manages to be that way all the time. I am sarcastic with people I know really well. With everyone else I am standoffish and quiet, but polite.

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18 Mar 2009, 8:36 pm

What i have come to understand baout myself as a woman wiht autism, dx'ed AS - who has very good verbal skills is this:

I can dish it out.
BUt i cannot take it.

i cannot take it and do not understand when people are sarcastic or flippant with me.

for that reason, my life is a comedy of errors once people start getting close to me.
my homelife is a series of defenses and stone-cold bare faced ignorance and literal comprehensionof things. eg - when my ex tries to be flippant or make a joke with me.
jokes via email exchange are even worse. i will go into a terrible spin over not understanding things, thinking the worst - when in the end - something turned out to be someone being funny.

the great blind spots in my life.

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19 Mar 2009, 9:14 am

millie wrote:

i cannot take it and do not understand when people are sarcastic or flippant with me.

That's got to do with what researchers call "lack of empathy". I've had that same issue all my life. We can't always figure out what we are doing to initiate responses in others. Some of us take things personally that aren't really meant to be take that way, too. Sometimes, we take things so personally that we obsess on it until something small becomes a huge deal to us and has too much influence over us so that it controls us to some extent, until we figure out it's in our best interest to forget about it and let it go.

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