Adults Must Have a Secret Language

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Another thread reminded me of this: When I was a kid, and even into my early teens, I was secretly convinced that adults must have a secret language that one is taught at a certain age. I have no idea where I got this notion, except that it could be related to my strong verbal skills and an assumption that if I could grasp English easily from childhood, surely adults - whose minds were seemingly far more developed than my own - must have some kind of language to which they alone were privy.

It's even more probable that while I had a good grasp of the grammar and syntax of language, my autism gave way to an intuition that I was missing something in everyday speech. I could hear and understand the literal meaning of words, but I noticed discrepancies between the words spoken or written, and the apparent meaning that they conveyed to other people.

In restrospect, I should have known better given how poorly many adults manage using English in day-to-day communication, but the notion that my parents probably spoke a secret language away from kids was very real to me at the time.

I think that adults certainly behave entirely differently when kids aren't around. When kids aren't around, adults actually act like older kids, the only difference being that adults are more self-sufficient. There's no moment where a child becomes an adult. Go to a bar at 1:30am and the behavior you witness from 30 year olds is actually more childish than that of most 15 year old children.

Also, as you get older, you look back at the person you were just a year before your current age and realize how irresponsible that version of you was and you think that the current version of you is now so much more mature and responsible. But then a year later you will look back and think the same thing.

Actually there is a secret language. You begin to learn it around 65 years of age.

It's disguised in groans and moans when you straighten up from bending over and becomes more and more evolved and complex as you age (although I guess I won't be quoting Huxtable for a while ).

Now that I've been an adult for quite some time I can safely say that adults are "faking being adults" especially in front of the kids.

<Don't do like I do son, >

Your suspicion that adults have a secret language around kids is not completely unfounded. There are certain things adults shouldn't want children thinking about and might use this language to keep the children from knowing about it.

Heck, my mother had a language that she thought was secret to everyone accept to the people she intended it for, which she usually reserved for insults without ruining her self image for everyone else.

I can relate. I recognized pretty early on that I was missing out on information that everybody else was getting. For a while I thought that other people just weren't including me and were hashing all that stuff out somewhere I couldn't hear them. Then I realized that it wasn't that they were hanging out without me, but that I just didn't get it. It was like everybody else had received The Book of Rules, Regulations and Secret Codes at birth. Or that there was this invisible radio communication going on all the time except I didn't have a receiver.

Secret Language? I noticed when I was around 2nd grade. (Was that too early?) I'm still frustrated on that part, and I'm already at college.
All my online friends kept telling me that "You'll learn it when you're (insert whatever number is greater value than my age)..." Sometimes much older than theirs. Sometimes much some of younger than the ones who already knew it. Same thing IRL.
It's not like I'm going to be 'influenced' by them. (Hell, I'm surrounded by perverts both irl*high school especially* and online*as they are, openly perverts* ever since when I was 13, and I still can't appreciate adult jokes)
And it's not like I'm THAT naive, I simply asked a simple question when there's no answer in a dictionary, and they just don't get straight to the point; which annoys me more.
Some kept telling me that I'm going to be 'traumatized' or 'scared'. That didn't happened when I found out-- it's no different than learning another information. I don't get what's 'entertaining' about it.
But at least sometimes my mom or my sister gets to the point, sometimes not. When I told people online I'll ask them, they all go crazy. XD

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