CJ the Curmudgeon

[cjsmith]

I'm beginning to lose patience with a certain category of people. Oh, I'm not proactively rude, but I no longer accept some pronouncements unquestioned.

"I can't swallow pills," someone said to me once. Well, I carefully didn't say, you better not live to be much older. (NB: This person had no dramatic anatomical weirdness. She could swallow food and drink.) Seriously, who lives to middle age without learning to cope with swallowing pills? Heck, who gets to COLLEGE age and hasn't learned to cope with that one? I felt like she was bragging that she was still five years old inside, and a spoiled five at that.

I remember a recent comment in a friend's journal about not dealing well with needles. I can relate. I used to faint -- no kidding here, FAINT -- at the sight of needles in use. I now inject myself daily. I don't LIKE it, don't get me wrong, but I DO it. There are certain special-snowflake attributes that I simply no longer have the luxury of keeping.

"Restrictive diets don't work for me," said a coworker of mine at lunch today, referring to what I don't eat on the Lyme/antibiotic/yeast-control diet. And this time, I spoke up.

"They don't?" I said. Like you're so special, I didn't say, that if you got this disease you would somehow be above managing it. "What if you knew that eating ice cream would make you pretty sick?" I asked instead. "What if you knew it would land you in the hospital, what then? Where's the line?"

He readily rephrased, saying he has no strong motivation to lose weight; I agreed that I could totally understand that, and we rambled off on side topics.

I think I'm beginning to see that in some cases, "special snowflake" translates to "I've been very lucky in certain ways and I take it for granted." I don't have nearly as much patience with that as I once had.

Bad me, for having little patience? Maybe, but y'know, I'm not at all sure of that.

Comments

[chinders.livejournal.com]

Linguistically speaking, I'd say that most people use a few different "can't"s. There's the "can't" of "no seriously, I can't swim" the "can't" that's shorthand for "I'm unable to under the pre-assumed restrictions, such as time, pressure, etc" and there's the "can't" of "I would find that very difficult to deal with," which is, I think, most of what's being talked about here.

In the conversation "I'm diabetic and have to have daily insulin injections" "Oh, I just can't deal with needles!" I would argue that the second person is most likely actually trying to communicate "I can't imagine doing that, needles are very difficult for me to deal with" and doesn't actually mean to communicate "If I was in your position I would rather die than have those injections". Yes, this overlap in effective meanings is annoying, particularly to those who actually have to make the latter choice. But I don't think it's malicious or even overly insensitive in most cases, (I'm prepared to be proven wrong in replies, though.) I think it's just a quirk of the use of implicature associated with this word in our language.

That said, there are insufferable people out there who plain refuse to deal with life. There are also people who heavily object to certain aspects of life for various reasons, and the response doesn't have to be a binary choice between "grow up, suck it up & deal" and "I'm a special snowflake!" Sometimes it does, in medical instances in particular, but there are many cases where finding a creative way around the problem rather than having to "grow up" one's way *through* it is much more productive for everyone involved.

Cathy, who is a linguistics nerd.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I would argue that the second person is most likely actually trying to communicate "I can't imagine doing that, needles are very difficult for me to deal with" and doesn't actually mean to communicate "If I was in your position I would rather die than have those injections".

Yes, I suspect you've hit the nail on the head here. The second person may even be trying to communicate sympathy or empathy by way of saying "wow, needles are a toughie". Instead of that message, I hear "wow, I haven't been faced with anything half that hard", and my gut reaction is along the lines of "well thanks for rubbing my nose in it."

I may grow more patience again as I get older and get more used to the fact that I will never be truly healthy. It's possible my current curmudgeonliness is based mainly in frustration.

[chinders.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I totally hear and respect your frustration. Health problems really, really suck. I also understand why you hear things the way you do- one of the frustrating things here is that fact that because you are in the position that you have to consider factors in your life that many people don't, and because of that you may perceive meanings and interpretations that may not be intended- but because your life is more complicated, it becomes YOUR job to be flexible and charitable about these interpretations, rather than the speaker's job to be sensitive about them in the first place.

*hugs*

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I think there's even a name for that concept, in the legal world if not in the linguistic world: the person who is the "odd man out" in a sense is the one who carries the extra responsibility of translating from the regular world to his own.