Muddy Blurder

"I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity." -Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you can say loquacity, you obviously are not tongue-tied. I, on the other hand, have been suffering a spate of mealy-mouthed mumbling. Ok, it's not really mumbling.

I switch letters. It's always the first letter of two words. So I'll say, "muddy blurder" instead of "bloody murder". The results can be funny. Unfortunately, this, like so many of my new brain quirks, happens most frequently when I am stressed, highly emotional or tired.

The switcheroo is not something you want to be doing when trying to appear professional and competent at, say, an interview for an internship, or when trying to convince the local code enforcement officer that you should not have to make any repairs or changes to your building since there are no tenants residing there. I could have made up something more dramatic, but we write what we know.

This is the kind of thing that is funny when it happens to someone else, but mortifying when it happens to you. If you were frustrated or stressed or angry to begin with, telling someone to, "Stop that night row!" doesn't help.

So what is causing my current linguistic loopiness? I really don't know. My stress level has ramped up as of late, but I have been getting enough sleep. (At least I think I am.)

This is one of the things that fascinates me about TBIs. I want to know why we make the mistakes we make when we make them. Ugh. That was inelegantly phrased. What I mean is, why only switch the first letter? Why only some words? It seems mostly to be consonants. Parts of speech are stored differently in the brain, does the same go for consonants and vowels?

I was hoping to be able to study this sort of thing if I got into a doctoral program. Maybe it's really not that important, but I do think it would help us understand not only how a non-broken brain works, but also help identify subtle brain injuries that might not show up on standard medical scans. If there are "mistake patterns" that are typical for head injuries, it could be another way to diagnose TBI. Like so many other brain injury symptoms, this is not a constant, it comes and goes and depends on a number of other, external and internal, factors. Still, I would like to find more a more quantitative means to pin down this slippery diagnosis. Language patterns, especially mistake patterns might be one way to do it.

There's a dissertation in there somewhere; I knust jow there is.