My little dyslexia. A manifesto of defiance.

So actually it’s not dyslexia, more like dyslalia. But it definitely sounds better as a title. “My little dyslalia”… now that sounds more like a romantic short story about a man who’s in love with a girl whose parents mistook the dictionary for The One-In-A-Million Baby Name Book. You know it’s true, too. There must be at least one Dyslalia Jones walking around somewhere in West Virginia. You know about those stories of folks naming their kids Moon Unit and Kal-el and Edward Cullen Jones and whathaveyou. Point is, don’t name your baby girl Dyslalia. And no, don’t name your baby boy that either.

Personally the most outlandish names I’ve ever heard belonged to a pair of brothers: Felt and Steel. I kid you not, and if my sister is to be believed –which she is, of course– they were the sons of a Materials Engineer who as plain as day was thoroughly enthusiastic about his field. Still, I think the bizarreness of the names pales in comparison to the improbable fact that the guy actually convinced his wife to go along with it. That for me is the true mystery of the matter.

Then there’s the old-fashioned names. You know, those with which there’s nothing actually wrong but which sound inevitably funny nowadays, like Tristram or Hortense, but whose fault is nothing more than a mild case of anachronism, and are by no means an assault on a child’s psyche like, say, Punisher. Punisher Jones, probably.

I remember when I was in college. I had a classmate whose name was Fortunate and who went on to be the star in an anecdote some friends from back in the day still come up with. Every time. All of said friends, including Fortunate, had some artistic inclination or other and we all participated in the university’s musical theater plays. Mind you, I was the band’s guitarist, so don’t go about bashing my street cred. I rocked. Even when playing all that Broadway stuff, my DOD-FX57 distort pedal was cranked all the way up. There. Anyway, this odd-named fellow was an actor or a dancer or both, I forget which; but the thing is that being one or the other, and the musical being about some people in 18th century France being confused about their lovers or some such, and spontaneously singing about their misgivings, this guy had to be dressed in character all the time, ready to back up whatever character was longing for his lover or flirting with someone else’s lover or scheming about making some other lovers break up. You know, your standard French fare.

While these shenanigans went on, we the cool musicians would comfortably sit in the musicians’ pit in the proscenium, and more often than not we were a tad more than comfortable, to wit, watching the play through a light(ish) ethylic veil. Such things were obviously frowned upon by the director –though happily not as much, if at all, by our musical director– and the reader may wonder how the hell did we manage to spirit our spirits there in the first place. By a stratagem most simple, actually: one of the musicians would enter the theater carrying my guitar case as he casually greeted the guard. Then the bass player would enter, then the trumpet player… and then myself, carrying my guitar in my hand. Like Poe’s Purloined Letter, the best strategy is hiding in plain sight. David Copperfield had nothing on us, really.

So during one of the rehearsals, this fellow Fortunate –and not the other way around as it will soon be plain to see– had his eye on one of the pretty dancers, and being a bold and dashing man, he approached her and started a conversation during one of those moments which are demarcated by that expression which has always grated me for no discernible reason, “Take five!”. Maybe the reason is that the tune made famous by Dave Brubeck infallibly starts running through my head and I can’t focus on actually using that time for having no tunes or anything at all running or otherwise pestering my head’s running grounds. Anyway, there I am with my other fellow musicians, just loitering around with a jazz tune stuck in my head, and casually watching Fortunate making his move nearby. The conversation indeed seemed to be proceeding rather well –and that is one mighty achievement, since you have to picture him doing his best James Dean while dressed in a profusely laced and ample white shirt, with a coquettish mole painted just above and to the right of his mouth, and wearing one of those wigs we always picture on stern judges’ heads– until she said, “So what did you say your name was?” He hadn’t actually, relying only on his charm and wit and leaving such an unimportant, unromantic detail for later. So when he said “Fortunate”, we heard what has to be the best passion-dampening moment I’ve ever witnessed, read about, heard as rumor, conjured or dreamt to this very day. She said in a perfect, crystalline, bereft-of-any-malice voice, “Hahaha no, I mean your real name, not your character in the play”.

I honestly do not remember how things played out, because every time those friends get together and start re-embellishing old tales, we only get to that part of the story before breaking out in laughter; but I dearly hope, for the sake of both their mental healths in a sort of retroactive manner, that the director called everyone back to places at that very moment.

But now that I think of it, I was talking about my dyslexia which is actually dyslalia. And which is little and harmless but rather funny, as anyone who loves comedies of errors can attest. But I should clarify that these are not straight-up disease-ridden equivocations, so much as what I think are just the usual bumps along the learning process of a child. After all, taking heed of those lurid, shifting things that somehow float inside your noggin and then translating them accurately by means of several awkward movements of the same organ you more importantly use to eat and spit, is a task which is not easily mastered. Much less learning to recognize those grunts and whistlings when you see them splattered with the ink of dead mollusks over a piece of bleached tree bark. Why didn’t Evolution think that clap-talking would be a good idea?

Those matters notwithstanding, there came a day when I was confronted with and forced to learn the words “windshield wiper”. It happens to all of us at some point. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, well dear reader, today is your day of reckoning. But you have the immediate luxury of Wikipedia and the Oxford Learners Dictionaries just one click away, which I had not.

It must have been at least one hundred times that I tried, before bluntly deciding that that particular sequence of phonemes was something I didn’t want to put up with at all, so I just went ahead and in its place I put “Here-there-go-stick”. That wonderfully creative alternative, together with a few more, went on to become standard use in my family, part of a larger and exclusive cultural legacy which we have passed on to our progeny, and of which I now reveal this one gem for the first time in history, for the amusement and edification of my readers. And perhaps I shall write more about that matter in another occasion, but definitely not now because that is not dyslexia. Nor dyslalia, I think. Surely our best scientific minds must have already studied such cases and attached some horrid word to it, as they are wont to do. My grandma said all those quirks could be cured by simply gargling gravel.

But as you will see, my problem was more idiosyncratic than neurological. The thing is, there were words which simply didn’t sound or looked right, the way those cunning adults tried to teach them to me, so I just went with my own versions of them. Now before my reader passes judgement about me as a phonetically or orthographically wayward child, I had grounds for my defiance. My parents loved language, its intricacies, its games and puns. Mom used to teach me the word games of the Spanish Sicle d’Or, telling me the legend about how the poet Quevedo taunted the Queen –who was lame– to her very face, using an ingeniously constructed phrase. Offering her two flowers he said, “Entre el clavel y la rosa, Su Majestad escoja” (May the Queen choose among the carnation and the rose). The thing is, the word “escoja” (you choose) sounds the same as the two words “es coja”, meaning “is lame”. Of course it’s most probably just a legend, because we have no records of the Queen being exceedingly stupid or partially deaf, but only lame, and seventeenth-century Spain being what it was, Quevedo wouldn’t have dared to say such a thing without knowing he could get a severe case of dungeonitis.

My father was more on the homely side of tuition, so he contented himself with teaching me hilarious stories from the countryside where he grew up, as well as all kinds of tongue-twisters, such as repeating the words “camarón-caramelo-caramelo-camarón” (shrimp-candy-candy-shrimp), which is similar to “Sarah Sarah sitting in a shoeshine shop…”, with the intention of mixing you up as you go on. And believe it or not I did mix them up just now, trying to type them a minute ago. You got me, dad. Again.

What I want to say is that I felt thoroughly justified in my rebelliousness. Words are to be played with and subjected to our whims, not the other way around. I’m not saying I was aiming for Finnegans Wake-level skulduggery, no. I was only a child. But I did liberally move around some sounds until I thought that was the right-sounding combination for that word. As an example, I refused to pronounce the name of Guadalajara City as it is written. I exchanged the D for the L and arrived at the more sweet-sounding Gualadajara. I would slip the word by in conversations too, without people noticing. Those were proof of the correctness of my experiments. Do pronounce both of them and tell me I was wrong. Just feel them, as you see my own option rolling softer out the tongue.

So yes, it was a rebellious, conscious dyslalia (rebellalia?).

I could go on with many an example of how I conducted this quest in my native Spanish, but that would be too burdensome for my reader, and if he or she is not fluent in that language, they will make little sense. What I can say is that the quest did obviously spill out into English, and of this I can give you one example, easier to relate to. Actually I must make a confession as I give the example: for, just a few days shy of wandering in this wonderful world for all of 45 years and also long after I had to conform to the “accepted” way of saying words, I find out that there is an English word I have mispronounced ever since I saw it for the first time. Yet thinking a bit upon the matter, I have no recollection of any major trouble I have gotten into, or of any friendship that has been offended by my saying it the way I like it, and I’m quite sure I have used it in public more than once. This being so, I turn with renewed fondness to that childish quest and affirm it today.

The word I’m referring to and whose “correct” pronunciation has just now caused me an inordinate amount of grief is Gridiron.

For some reason which is rather cumbersome to explain, I remembered this word this morning and for an even obscurer reason I wanted to use it to make it rhyme with something else, and I wanted to know the exact cadence of the word. So, living as we are in this wonderful time when we can dispel this kind of doubt immediately, I went on to an online dictionary. First I saw the pronunciation, as portrayed by that hideous system that they like to call Phonetic Transcription. It didn’t help much, because if we’re being serious, who can pronounce this thing?: /grid• ī (ə)rn/

It is stupefyingly horrific. Who came up with this system anyway? It’s more impenetrable than Finnish, or Inuit, or the tongue of Chtulhu. I’d rather learn Vogon poetry.

Good heavens. But the beautiful thing is that, on top of those useless signs, dictionaries nowadays have a handy button you can click on, so you can just hear some speaking software tell you the word. Well, I do hope it’s a software and not some bored-to-death intern saying every word in the dictionary. Or someone in a virtual dictionary sweat shop. That would really be worse. And extremely bizarre.

But something awful happened when I clicked the button. I heard something that shattered my conceptions. Or my conception of that word, anyway. I want to be dramatic about it. You see, many many years ago, when I first saw that word written, it seemed like a perfectly cool word. So round and overwhelming, so metal. I wanted to write a metal song titled Gridiron one day. Why didn’t they name a kaiju or a Transformer Gridiron? The problem is –because for some miraculous reason I spent my whole life shielded from actually hearing someone pronounce it in my presence– I always thought it sounded:

“griddyrun”

And here I was this morning, in front of the unforgiving online dictionary who spouted a completely different set of sounds than I expected. “Grid-iron”? Grid? Iron??

Fire and brimstone! (as Othello would say in one of his fits). But yes: there it was. I checked and rechecked. American pronunciation, British pronunciation. Grid-iron, grehd-aaah’n. Mocking me biaccentually. This could not be. This was a travesty of phonetics and of all that is good in the world. But as I say, there it was, genealogy from Middle English and all, something about confusion of r’s and l’s in Norman dialect and medieval fire-torture instruments. Wait, what? Medieval torture? It’s got a bad attitude too! Sooo deeply metal! And yet, at the same time my picture of it was shattered. I felt cheated.

Still, there are no two ways about it. Mea culpa. I yield to the cold, hard facts. But I do not abide this fate! And since we’re speaking Latin now, I say –nay, shout– together with those irreverent goliards who –about the same time the Normans were confusing their r’s and l’s– composed the poems of Carmina Burana: non me tenent vincula, non me tenet clavis! Chains and locks cannot bind me: that child was right. His logic was perfect and his creativity beautiful. I will keep saying “griddyrun”. I will. I am free.

Maybe I will say it fast and turn my head a little when I do, though.