DAS Blog

Does anybody study the notions of "private languages"? I notice I have certain code words, inside jokes, etc., that all but constitute a language incomprehensible to outsiders when I speak with my brother (evidently this is the remanent of a "twin language" we used to share as young kids even though we are 3 years and 9 months apart) and similarly with my friends and now my wife and daughter. How widespread is this phenomenon? How many words in, e.g., the Adictionary, are from such private languages? Who studies this? What has been learned?

Specifically from my friends' and my code language -- we have a habit of avoiding all verbs but forms of "to have" and turning all other verbs into nouns ending in the suffix "ness". E.g. the preceding thought would be expressed as "we have a habit of having verb avoidanceness with exception-existingness for forms of the verb 'to have', thus having turningness of other verbs into nouns having the suffix of 'ness' endingness". It ends up sounding like a bad translation of Heidegger (sp), don't it?

In my brother's and my code language, we have "peppiness level" from my dad's minor sub-mania -- he is never fully manic but is oftentimes "peppy".

Speaking of which, how much is it appreciated that bipolar disorder may be a heterogeneous set of disorders? E.g. bipolar disorder runs on both sides of my family, but the disorder on my mom's side is very different than that on my dad's side. In the former case, "mixed states" predominate" while, except for my paternal grandmother who had classic bipolar disorder, on my dad's side, the typical form is "peppiness" with occasional bouts of lassitude and anomie. And I was once set up with a girl who had bipolar with both mixed states, mania and depression but was marked with the sorts of almost autistic like cognitive defects not seen in classical bipolar outside of psychotic breaks -- even when her mood was relatively stable without any other sign of even neurosis and certainly not psychosis, she still lack a "theory of mind" or even the sort of "meta-theory of mind" that many autistic people have in lieu of an intuitive theory of mind. Has this been studied?

Has anybody come up with a "mass transit bill of rights"? I think it's ridiculous that I cannot take a mass transit from point A to point B (within the same metro area with supposedly one of the most extensive mass transit systems in the nation) without it taking 2+ hours (when driving would take < 1.5 hours) and requiring me to walk to my final destination over roads that have no frickin' side-walks! Someone needs to distill this ridiculousness (have distillation of narishkeit?) into a "bill of rights" that can be circulated as a petition.

So many questions ... and yet while I should be doing even my own research, I'm blogging! ;)