Golden Deer Pub Community Forums

PLA reads Hyperbole and a Half.

are you going to start calling me nadles

na, thahd be mahn.

I don't like the spaghetti noodle strips as much.

They get to me because I am particularly susceptible to funny voices and/or accents.

Also, noodles.

I admit I laughed at that strip. Especially when I read it aloud.

I could pull the "well I was born with a speech impediment and its not funny" but that's a total lie, I tell hilarious stories about my utter inability to verbally communicate constantly. Although sometimes even today I'll fuck up and say something just completely wrong, or, more commonly, trip over syllables, and then it's not funny, it's embarrassing.

I just don't think they're funny : / then again, there's just so many that she did for a while, and you're like "I.. what... huh?" when compared to the "regular" stuff at Hyperbole and a Half.

Ah, yeah. My brother had to attend speech therapy for years because he was so difficult to understand. He would get so angry, so frustrated. ;_; I sometimes have difficulties in speech as well. I forget words and end up using way too much circumlocution to get at what I'm trying to say. I've been asked many, many times where I'm from, what's my first language, what kind of accent do I have and why... It's not an accent. I just can't speak normally sometimes. : /

Myself: "It's... it's the thing where you store cold stuff!" /makes frantic rectangular hand motions in the air
Another: "...Refrigerator?"
Myself: "YES! Good job, brain. Now we look really smart."

And yeah, sometimes I'm not quite in the right mood to read her stuff and it falls flat. Her latest one made me laugh really hard, but it also made me deeply sad.

I tend to have problems with enunciation, I think due to a combination of my soft voice and the fact that my mouth is always trying to catch up with my brain and trips all over itself, producing an unintelligible verbal slurry.

I have a fairly big vocabulary, but can't actually pronounce the words. I can't spell very well, either, but I know what stuff means, I swear ;__;

Mixed with my habit of mumbling when I'm in a group of people, I'm hard to understand a lot of the time. When I'm with one or two people I know well I talk a lot better. Groups make me feel uncomfortable.

Yeah, I was in speech therapy for a long time. My worst problem was with the "r" sound, but when I started talking I could not pronounce correctly about 90% of the phonemes used in English, among them "r" and "th" ... and "f" and "p" and...

thus my amusing story of riding bus 13 in kindergarden, and having to wear a little button that said "I Ride Bus 13" because if someone was to ask what bus I rode, my response would be "bhwus whoww'heen" -- and there was the chance I could get put on bus 14, and end up in the wrong house. My immediate family, especially my mother, could understand me well enough, but few other people could.

I invented a game to play with my best friend, and I meant to call it "Richest Cat" because it involved trying to sneak around and steal an imaginary treasure, but she always called it "Witch's Cat" because I couldn't say my Rs. I used to have to do long lists of R-words, and I'd have to get through the whole list without a single fuck up, and oh my god it was so hard, you can't imagine what that's like... words that start with R, that's a little easy, it's right there (read, write, rake) but then they get trickier... (barrel, story, bread) -- and then really tricky... (throw, floor, world) and, then, my nemesis -- Brother. It was always on every list, and I nearly always flubbed it. And you'd have to read these stories, they weren't even that good of stories, but it was harder than the lists, because you think you've totally got it under control and then, bam, "Fire" comes out like "hiwew" and you're just a big dumb failure.

I've made vast improvements over the years, but I'm still prone to spoonerism, word substitutions, and slurring sounds together if I'm not careful. Spoonerism are when you flipped syllables, like "please hand me that pan of caint" or "Oh my god, I'm blushing gud!" instead of "can of paint" and "gushing blood" (those are actual spoonerisms I have done before) Certain words are very hard for me, like anything with a difficult or tricky "R" sound or, worse yet, w-r sounds -- "World War" was a huge tongue twister for me for a very long time, and I have a very, very hard time with "warm/worm"

I could not say "oxygen" until I was about 13 years old, and "specifically" until I was around 18 years old.

I do tend to get a little sulky/sullen sometimes if I flub up and embarrass myself, especially when people try to tease me or point out my mistakes -- I understand if you need clarification, but I hate when people give you a shit-eating grin and say things like "what was that?" or repeat whatever fuck-up I just made. Of course they have no way of knowing it's a sensitive subject for me. I take it in stride.