Three things I recently learned about myself

1. I'm sort of able to read lips?

I mean not consciously, but lip-reading is definitely more important to my speech comprehension than I thought. For the training sessions I had to do at work this month, one of the trainers had a mild speech impediment. It's not a big deal, but combined with my audio processing disorder, it meant I was almost completely unable to understand him for one of the training sessions. Luckily, that training was about something unrelated to my job that I don't need to know. There was no test, so all I had to do was sign a sheet to prove that I was there, and not fall asleep. I made it through okay.

But for the last training session on Wednesday, the class size was smaller, and I had a good view of the trainer for the duration. I decided to try to focus on his face while he was talking, and to my surprise, I was able to make out almost everything. It was shocking how much of a difference it made. I know intellectually that visual data is a big part of language comprehension, but having such a clear-cut A/B test was eye-opening.

That's probably one of the reasons I need subtitles to watch movies and TV shows, but I'm able to watch video essays with no issues: in movies and TV, cameras often don't give you a a dead-on view of a speaker's lips, and having to change my attention from one character to another increases the cognitive load. Now I understand why people look at each other's faces when they talk to each other. I'm going to try to do it more. (Video essays are good practice.)

2. I have a problem with words ending in -sher

Well, okay, I only have two examples, but that's enough to postulate a trend.

So I believe we should try to de-gender previously gendered occupations, but for some reason, referring to the profession in which a person catches fish as "fisher" sounds wrong to me. That's the obviously correct term we should be using, but it feels weird to say and it's jarring to hear. It sounds like a mistake. I don't know why. I don't have this issue with any other gender-neutral occupation revision. My theory is that with most of these changes, the new term has more syllables than the old term. Mailman becomes "mail carrier". Stewardess becomes "flight attendant". Fireman becomes "firefighter". Etc. I was easily able to adapt to these terms; indeed, the old terms now feel like silly relics of my youth.

But with "fisherman", it feels like the gender-neutral term should be more complicated. Where the other new terms sound more sophisticated, "fisher" sounds less sophisticated, even a little childish. (Maybe my brain is making a subconscious connection to Fisher-Price.)

But what other term is there? Obviously we can't keep using "fisherman". "Fish-catcher" sounds like someone driving around the neighborhood picking up stray fish and taking them to the fish pound. Some video games in which fish-catching is an occupation you can choose use the term "angler". I like that, but it only really works for the kind of fishers (it sounds even weirder plural) who catch fish with a rod and reel, not the ones who cast nets out at sea.

An angler in Fantasy Life.

I don't have a solution. I guess I'll just keep saying "fisher" and hope someday it sounds normal!

The other "-sher" word I have issues with is "washer", as in "washer and dryer". "Dryer" sounds normal, but "washer" doesn't sound like the right word to use. I think this problem is because a washer is a little round disc with a hole in the middle, and that somehow became the standard definition (the 480i, if you will) of the word washer to me. At least this one has an easy solution: "washing machine". It's a few more syllables, but I don't think anyone will think I'm odd for using it. And hey, "washer/dryer" sounds normal to me, because that's a compound word. It clearly differentiates it from the other kind of washer. Maybe there's hope for me on the "fisher" front. I need to figure out how to recontextualize it.

3. I can only effectively write around 1000 words on a single topic per day

Yesterday at work I wrote around 1000 words of my big book post. I tried to write more that evening, but I couldn't get my brain in gear. So I wrote a short replacement post. I wrote around 1000 more words of the big post today, and tried to continue once I got home. Again, I just couldn't get past the inertia. I'd try to write a sentence, reword it 3 or 4 times, not really be satisfied, try to write another sentence, reword it 3 or 4 times, etc. It's some sort of weird mental block. But if I have something else to write about, I don't have a problem with that. I'm pretty sure this has always been the case and I just never noticed the pattern. Like sometimes I can push a single entry to 1200, maybe 1500 words, but I've never been able to do xK a day. This seems fine. It's not a very fast pace, but I feel better now that I've identified a limitation. It means I'll never be able to do NaNoWriMo, but that's okay, because NaNoWriMo is now NoMo. I've never finished a 50,000 word novel in a month, but NaNo is dead and I'm still around; therefore, I declare myself the winner. 🏅