What Did You Say?

Having a family member with Asperger Syndrome has taught me many things. One of the most important is to be very clear when giving information or instructions because there is a good chance that the aspie person will take my words literally or focus on just one part of what I said and miss the deeper meaning. Of course I sometimes get it wrong and it leads to some surprising misunderstandings like the time not so long ago when my son was asked to put the bin bag outside. I intended him to take the bin bag from the kitchen and put it in the wheelie bin outside but I didn't say that, so when I went out to the car I found the bin bag sitting in splendid isolation in the front garden. Luckily I found it before the local cats got their claws into it.


Last night I was chatting to Robbie about one of our children and I said "he seems to have taken umbrage because I told him off ......" The look on Robbie's face told me that he was no longer listening to me. After a few moments he repeated the word 'umbrage' several times as if he was exploring the shape and sound of the word. Then he looked up with a satisfied expression and asked if the word had something to do with a humpback bridge. I told him that it was just a phrase that meant the person was displeased because they felt slighted in some way. I had to look up the exact meaning of umbrage in order to tell him that the word had a Latin root and it meant shade, shadow or darkness. The word only survives in English now as the phrase to 'take umbrage'. Robbie told me to stop, he said that I had given him far too much information (now he knows what I have to put up with!) and anyway he preferred his own definition of a humpbacked bridge. No wonder it is so hard to understand him sometimes!