Taking things literally, figures of speech, etc.

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Isn't it NORMAL that a person who has never been explained a particular idiom would be baffled by it or try to pick it apart logically to understand its meaning or simply take it literally? I mean, how else do people learn? I heard "put your cards on the table" before but never heard "bring your checks to the table" (like an earlier poster had heard and mistook), and also would have been baffled by it and figured out how to do it literally. So, what do NTs do? Seriously, they ALL can't understand EVERY figure of speech that they hear, can they? I get metaphors... as a writer I even make them up myself. But if you hear something new, how do people generally understand what they mean? I generally think that people say what they mean, and if it doesn't make sense, try to figure it out logically. Isn't that logical?

Now, I've been around the block A LOT, and consider myself pretty in the know about a lot of things. However, I saw Book of Mormon a few days ago and it took me at least 5-10 minutes to "get" a joke that everyone else was hysterical about. Apparently, a guy was kneeling on all fours on a medical table with a giant Xray showing something on the Xray. I asked my husband, What is that? He said, The Bible. I thought, Oh, ok... not too funny. Was it in his pocket and he forgot to take it out? Was he born with it inside him, and that was why he became a missionary? That's weird but not that funny. Then several minutes later I finally linked it all together that the Villain who had confronted earlier had shoved the bible up the guy's ass. My husband rolled his eyes when I finally got it. So I guess I can be a bit slow...

I have two thoughts on this. I find figures of speech that are cliches much easier to deal with. The postmodern notion of discouraging cliches is something that I find difficult, because with well known figures of speech, I usually understand the meaning ahead of time, but with an original, I'm at a disadvantage.

As far as the Mormon having a Bible shoved up his posterior, there is a different dynamic at work here, which is the politically correct double standard involving Christians. Had, say, a Quran been shoved up a Muslim's posterior, likely nobody would have been laughing. These are social rules.

For example, when California's proposition banning homosexual marriage a few years ago passed, it was common to blame Mormons even though they hardly had the numbers to enforce their will. Blacks, on the other hand, voted overwhelming against homosexual marriage, but they couldn't be blamed due to the same social rules.

I would be laughing! In fact, Stone/Parker did try to make fun of the Muslims (I love equal opportunity insanity) but the network pressured them into altering the South Park episode where Prophet Muhammad's image was supposed to be revealed. I seriously doubt that they would have pulled it were it not for the incredible media/political pressure put upon them. I would have loved for them to have the balls enough to say "F-you all" and do it anyway (as I thought they would) but alas, the pressure was too much. I could imagine hearing them fight over it in the board room...

I think the way most people know these are expressions is that they're too extreme to be true. But we Aspies tend to consider more things possibilities than NT's, so what's too extreme to be true to a NT may be plausible to us.

I guess it depends on the idiom. I picked up "raining cats and dogs" very quickly because (1) I could easily see that cats and dogs weren't actually falling from the sky, and (2) even I considered that impossible to actually happen. But there are probably idioms out there that I don't know of, and take literally because they're not as extreme as the above example.

It also helped that in 8th grade, there was a unit in my literature class specifically about idioms, and all students had to illustrate an idiom (with a picture applying it literally) with a verbal explanation of what it actually means below it.

I have always been pretty good with figures of speech. I can recall learning a lot of words when I was young and sometimes guessing at meanings and then verifying the guess by using the word or figure of speech with the possible meaning in front of my parents so they could correct me.

A lot of the time I could work out the meaning by thinking through the use and context. "tell me about it!" for example--clearly is an expression of agreement and not a request for additional detail.

I suppose I've run into a few instances in which someone used a figure of speech with which I was unfamiliar and I was momentarily baffled by it, but in the vast majority of cases, I've run into those types of words and phrases through reading long before I've actually heard someone use them in conversation, so I'd had an opportunity to decipher the gist of its meaning ahead of time. I actually enjoy reading encyclopedias of slang and colloquial phrase origins, to see where these peculiar exclamations originated.

There are figures of speech that you get both what they mean, and what they refer too.

Then there are those that only get what they mean (from hearing elders or TV characters use them) but dont have a clue what the reference is (unless you get the notion to research them). Incredibly- I think more than half of the idioms folks use are the latter.

Most adults know both the meaning and references in "place your cards on the table"(from poker), "taking a long shot"(from pool),"calling the shots"(also from pool),"three strikes and your out"(baseball), and such.

But everyone knows that getting "three square meals a day" is desireable, though virtually no one knows that it refers to the square shaped plates that british sailors ate off of in the old sailing ships ( square to save space in the cramped vessels).

Everyone knows that "giving it the whole nine yards" is giving your all.
But even word experts who wrote dictionaries of slang were baffled as to where the expression came from during my growing up. Only recently when someone noticed that the bullet belts that fed the machine guns mounted in the ball turrets of world war two bombers were always nine yards long did the origin become widely known.

Somehow folks keep using expressions long after the references are obsolete and forgotten.

A few weeks ago I got an email about a company breakfast that said please bring a dish. I showed up with my own plate only to realize they meant food so I retreated to my office and ate a granola bar.

I am 32 years old.

I once recently was asked for a count of ipads at my school when it was 5 minutes until quitting time on a Friday. I replied that I was leaving and would email the count on Monday.

Their reply said "ok great, I look forward to the count on Monday."

I replied with " what is so exciting about an inventory count? You actually are excited and looking forward to it?"

She replied "No, I just meant Monday is fine."

I think this is more along what "taking things literally" means.

I miss most jokes, which I consider a blessing. Following Wittgenstein, many phrases (including unfamiliar ones) are often accompanied by some bodily movement, action in general, so the words get deduced that way. Verbal behavior. Jokes are just cold words, though. Many NTs simply pretend to understand unfamiliar terms and expressions in the moment, research them later. It's like reading Chaucer perhaps, annotations and definitions are required to keep up. His jokes were better than the ones popular now in my opinion.

I have been baffled by jokes and idioms that I have never heard before.

Eg
in australia there is a joke that all Tasmanians are born with two heads and have scars from the surgery to remove them.

http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companio ... tation.htm

I moved to victoria from tasmania and had never heard of this. Heard people making the above joke and I didn't understand why.

I remember reading something years ago in Reader's Digest about a man moving to New England from somewhere else. He heard people using the phrase "a nominal egg". He started using it to fit in, only later learning that what they were actually saying was "an arm and a leg", but with their distinctive accent.

I'm pretty good with this kind of stuff, but I wasn't always. When I was a child, my father got angry with me and said "I'll fix your little red wagon.' I had a wagon that was broken, so I was excited that he was going to fix it. He had to explain to me that what he meant was that he was going to punish me if I didn't stop doing whatever it was that I was doing at the time.

An odd thing to be confused about.

"An arm and a leg" is only used after the phrase "it will cost you..".

The French say "Le ouve" -"the egg"- to mean a score of zero in tennis- which english speaking tennis players later corrupted to 'love'.

So if he heard New Englanders talking about expensive things "costing a nominal egg"( which could only mean "for free") he shouldve realized something wasnt right -and that he was misshearing them.

LOL, this could get a NT mistaken for autistic! I can see how a NT kid (particularly a young one) with an actual broken wagon could be fooled by this...

i don't understand poetry its not straight forward or logical and i almost failed the g.e.d. because it had some in the test , it just didn't register in my mind when there were questions about the nonsense that didn't even seem to be about the nonsense

also when people talk **** to me i take it very seriously

and it is very easy for people to lie to me if i haven't known them for a long time because it takes so long for me to be able to see the queue's

when i know they are lying and see them lie to someone then i take a mental picture and use that in the future to judge against

I'm terrible with poetry! If you want to say something, just say it. Does it always have to be in some code that only other poets can understand? A friend of mine in college had the same problem with poetry. She was in an advanced English class one semester, and they were studying poetry. In one poem, it said something about a woman in a wheat field with a ribbon in her hair. According to the professor, the wheat field represented fertility and the ribbon in the woman's hair meant that she was pregnant, and so on. Everybody else in the class was following the poem along ok, while my friend said she was flipping back and forth in the book thinking "What page are we on?!?!"

At one time in my life I did an English major at university and have therefore been exposed to large amounts of poetry and literature interpretation and I can assure you that it is quite possible to make it up as long as you sound intelligent and the stuff is sufficiently dense and inaccessible to anyone who might decide to dissect your verbiage. Essentially, I battled to make any sense of what was being said so instead of fighting it I just joined in and I did just fine. I remember once when a famous African writer visited and there was an open question-and-answer session. The professor whose specialisation was African literature had a distinctly impenetrable line of literary bull**** that was all about the 'marxist dialectic' and how what went unsaid in a piece of literature was more interesting than what was said. You can imagine that such logic can be diverged at will. Anyway, the time came when the professor stood up and asked the African writer a question. As usual, his question was completely abstract academic theory. The writer in question had no idea what he was being asked and wanted the question to be repeated or paraphrased and was none the wiser when it was restated. It was an extremely awkward situation; the lecturer had spent many lectures telling us what these African writers were saying and for such a writer to have no idea what the lecturer was asking completely undermined the lecturer's standing in our eyes. Obviously, he didn't know what the writers were thinking and writing about.

Nevertheless, I have a lot of sympathy for the lecturer. I reckon he was probably aspie (undiagnosed of course) and making a living happily making up endless reams of stuff; the critique of literature was valuable in its own right irrespective of its distance from the original literary works. Just as I had succumbed to the general pressure of the academic world, so had he. While i ca have a good laugh about it, who am I to judge? If I read what I just wrote I realise that I could easily have been a nutty professor.