I teach mathematics. In mathematics, we have a thing called “literal equations”.
When I first met this term, and indeed for a long time afterward, it confused me. Isn’t every equation literally an equation? What makes some equations more equation-y than other equations?
The issue here is that “literal” means something different in mathematical argot than it does in standard English. An equation is “literal” if the goal is to see the relationship between variables rather than to find the value of specific variables; the word “literal” is used because we use letters for variables.
In other words, the word “literal” is being used literally here, while in standard language we use it figuratively.
To clarify: The use of “literal” to mean “real” or “actual” is a figurative extension; the word originally meant “of letters and writing”.
Mathematical argot is an uncanny linguistic valley where many of the terms are related to standard language in often tenuous ways: tangent, argument, end, point, line, sector, variable, domain, range, derivative, differentiate, integral, integrate, term, and so on.
A component of learning to communicate effectively in mathematics is learning these words, whose definitions may feel like they were generated by the same AI that gives us six-fingered, three-legged people: Yeah, it’s close to reality, but not exact.
The thing is, though, in many of these cases, the mathematical term relies on an older sense of the term. This is the case for “literal”, for instance. A “literal equation” involves equating letters.
Over time, the world of English speakers not caught up in mathematical argot shifted the word to mean something slightly different. That’s where the six-fingered person was created, not in mathematics.
Now that that shift has happened, some people act as if it’s cast in stone. Using the word “literally” to indicate that you’re speaking figuratively or poetically can get you scolded for not using it “correctly”, even though “literal” and “figurative” derive from similar semantic origins (“figurative” being related to “figures” in the sense of symbols; the implied modern distinction being that “literal” refers to the actual meaning of the letters, which are symbols representing words, which are symbols representing thoughts, while “figurative” refers to the symbols that the letters represent in a metaphoric, not literal, which is to say, not actual sense).
Someone somewhere created rules about meanings that worked for them but don’t really make complete sense, and now everyone has to follow those rules or be mocked.
This is how it feels for me as an Autistic person trying to navigate a non-Autistic world.
(In case you were wondering what the metaphor in the title was.)
The word “radical” means three different things in high school education: In chemistry, in mathematics, and in social science. It means a fourth thing in pedagogy, although that’s somewhat related to the social science meaning.
Which of them is correct? All of them, based on their context. But if I heard some people talking about Karl Marx’s radical ideas and asked them what socialism had to with finding roots (which my audience might interpret as me asking about Karl Marx’s ancestry), it would lead to confusion.
Imagine if your primary language was that of mathematics (meaning, in this case, English mathematical argot), and you were only vaguely aware of the more figurative language that is conventional everyday English. You would struggle with understanding the people around you (except for the other people using solely mathematical language), and people would struggle with understanding you.
This isn’t a perfect metaphor for Autism because mathematical language is restricted in topic space (“space” in the non-mathematical sense). Autistic perspectives are as rich and varied as Neurotypical perspectives are.
However, I do think that what we’ve done linguistically with “literal” captures the frustration that many Autists, certainly myself, feel: It used to have a meaning “related to letters and words”, then it got a figurative meaning, and yet anyone who wants to give it an even more figurative meaning (one that has been used for centuries, by the way) risks being mocked.
The idea that rules can only be broken in ways that the people in social power approve of is extremely frustrating. When an Autist tries to play along with people roasting each other and then does it wrong–awkwardly, or too far–we get frustrated. We’re trying to follow the unspoken rules, but often just because we’re already seen as outcasts, we’re marked as doing it wrong, regardless.
A further irony is that Autists are often characterized as being self-centered and unable to see others’ perspectives, while this frustration comes from Neurotypical* people being unable or unwilling to see Autistic perspectives.
On one level, interacting as an Autist in a non-Autistic world feels like using a language that’s just slightly askew from the widely accepted language; it is a language that is spoken by other Autists, but is mocked by Neurotypical folks as weird.
* The opposite of “Autistic” is “Allistic”, but non-Autistic Neurodivergent people vary in how well they interact with either Autistic or Neurotypical people. And of course all generalizations are generalized and do not apply to everyone in their respective groups.