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The Sword and Laser discussion
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Hyperion
2012 Reads
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Hyp: Aphasia--the Poet's problem
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The Sword and Laser
Books mentioned in this topic
The Shadow Factory (other topics)One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing (other topics)
In Hyperion, the poet experiences extreme aphasia--losing nearly all the words he knew, retaining only words with strong emotional ties (swear words). This blog post is about someone who experienced aphasia in an opposite sort of way--he lost all the most common words, but retained the obscure ones.
As a writer and lover of language, Paul West had an unusually large and well-developed vocabulary, and when a stroke damaged language centers in his brain, he lost a large portion of common, everyday words, but still had access to the obscure, outer fringes of his vocabulary.
Like the poet, he eventually managed to recover most of his vocabulary (or learn the words anew), and wrote a book about it: The Shadow Factory
His wife, also a writer, wrote a book about the experience of dealing with his aphasia and how he regained his vocabulary: One Hundred Names for Love
Here's the blog post from Language Log:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/...