NTs DO THINGS with conversation...

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I think it can be many things, depending on the point of view or purpose of those in conversation.

It can be as simple as acknowledging a person's presence. Talk about the weather, etc.

'Social combat' (my description) is another. Two-faced conversations with double meanings for everything. Not a nice place to be. Very common in the South (US)

Probably other sorts of conversation as well

For example..?


I don`t think so. People just want to "hear" "I like you, you are fine".

'
For example, someone is saying verbally "This is great" and at the same time s/he sends the signal "It really sucks". People call it sarcasm.
Are you talking about something like this?

Ugh, I don't even want to hear about this. Social communication is stressful enough without thinking about all the things that may be going on that I'm not privy to.

Actually, maybe this is why other people always seem to have so much more drama in their lives than I do. There always seems to be drama like at work, at church, etc., that I'm not aware of until I hear people discussing it explicitly. They read things into each other's comments that I would never guess. Whatever, I think I'm happier *not* being aware of that particular information. I'm happy to take people's comments at face-value.

I've been trying to give examples as they come to my mind, but I haven't discovered yet many of the nonverbal purposes in someone's conversation, so I have very little variety of purposes in my examples. So far, I only grasp the "come closer", "go away", "not a chance in hell" purposes and little else.

I've observed that TONE is crucial. NTs DO different things with conversation, using the same words but with different intonation. The problem with intonation is that it's very different for different cultures, so you can't generalize when talking to someone from a different culture. You have to learn their intonation codes first.

Some intonations say: "No, but I'd be willing to consider it". Other intonations say "No, and it's final". And I'm not talking here about the obvious intonations that even I, as an NLDer, can grasp. But I can't give examples that will help anyone here, because they'd be from my culture's intonation codes. Like, here, if you grimace and say a short, whiny "No", it means there's no chance in hell I'll change my mind to "Yes". Much subtler, more polite than the "NOOO!", yet as firm and important to grasp. I guess it's the equivalent of Anglo-Saxon "Nah".

Yes this is very true

Here's an incident I found interesting:

Once, my boss tried to intervene with an irate parent for me, but it was to no avail. I had to meet with her face-to-face in spite of his efforts. But I e-mailed him and said something like "I know you tried to help me. Thanks much." He called me to his office and said he didn't appreciate the tone of my note. I didn't know what he was talking about. He looked at my face then and said, "Oh, I read it with sarcasm, like, 'Thanks a LOT!'"

I had to come right out and tell him that I don't do sarcasm with anyone, I am nice to everyone and I would never think of talking to my boss like that.

He has been much nicer to me this year. And I don't e-mail him anymore. If I need to talk to him, I do it in person. Less chance of him misreading me.

I absolutely agree we can't ever become or even pretend to be like NTs. But when my mother is very sick in hospital and I know I'm missing 75% of what the doctor is telling me, or my boss is talking to me a week before the mass firings, and I know 75% is nonverbal, I think it helps me to know at least a little bit about nonverbal language, so at least I won't be aghast at the later developments as I'd always been in my life - forever taken aback by people's later actions, not having seen anything coming.

Some purposes I can think of now:
Confusing/sidetracking
Persuading/dissuading
Establishing pecking order, establishing self as submissive/dominant
Getting to know you better
Distancing
Getting closer
Unloading stress
Eliciting info
Giving info
Justifying oneself/shaking off responsibility
Showing good will/enthusiasm/cooperativeness
Assuring oneself the cooperation of the listener
Refusing to help/getting out of a job
Declining a suggestion for joint activity
Communicating one's boundaries
Intimidating
Lowering the listener's expectations
Communicating one's type of interest (romantic/sexual/professional/friendship
/comraderie/etc)
Introducing oneself, giving a specific impression of oneself which one wishes to give
Upselling
Communicating agreement/disagreement with an idea, plan, etc.
Communicating one's attitude towards the listener (respect, recognition, admiration, etc. etc.)

yes. it can mean many things, which is why we aspies can spend days after an exchange wtih someone or with a group, trying to analyse what was meant. If i go and mix with people, apart from the exhaustion afterwards, there is the continual analysis and panic about what things "ACTUALLY" meant. this can last for weeks.
When i was in my early teens, i began to understand that one phrase could mean several things.

eg. What are you doing?

what i would do is take that phrase away from the initial exchange and then try to work it out. here are some examples of what it could mean:

1. WHAT task are you performing?
2. WHY are you performing that task? (loud shouting voice - which means they are angry because i am doing it.)
3. may i join you in what you are doing? (come up friendly. tone is softer and there is a smile on the face?)


these are just 3 examples. THere are many more, no doubt. Now i can, these days, get the gist of things a lot, because i have done so much work on this kind of thing and we aspies can LEARN this stuff. cognitively. and not intuitively. i am far better at it than my younger years. I spent many years just nutting this stuff out....grinding away at it, through breakdowns and substance abuse problesm and through all sorts of disadvantage. no wonder i didn't breeze through uni and find a nice little niche with a nice little job. i just remember swimming in a sea of words and phrases - a great, big, hideous alphabet soup of communications complexity.

BUt i still get jammed at the overload and analysis phase a fair bit. so i still take the phrase away with me (usually one phrase from an entire conversation,) and try to analyse it.

so, my point is - one phrase in english can mean a plethora of things depending on context, tone of voice, facial expression.

three things i have done to help with this....
1. I have limited my input ( i keep my life nice and routined and simple with few people and live in a quiet place to help with my coping of life.)
2. i have done a lot of cognitive therapy that is strategies based,
3. i have read a lot about human nature.

i still struggle at times, but i am a lot better at is than the years of complete isolation and lostness.

Number three here would have gone right over my head. I would simply have responded to it in exactly the same way as I would number one - answered the question, then continued with the task. Unless the person actually said, "May I join you?" it wouldn't have occurred to me that that was what they meant.

After reading explanations of this kind on here recently, I'm starting to realize that I actually miss even more of these kind of subtleties than I thought I did...

Aha.

Greentea, you could write a thesis on NT speak. I am serious I think you really could.

I didn't realize that before, I guess it makes sense when I look back at past conversations I have tried to have with NTs.

But you Anglo-Saxons should be more aware that NTs DO things with conversation, since you yourselves use the expression: "I see what you did there."

Cube, thanks for your kind words of appreciation. I share but I don't teach/preach. To teach/preach, I should be successful with NTs, which I'm totally not. In fact, I believe I'm the least successful with NTs on these forums.

hi hovis. yes. prior to ten years ago i would have missed it too. it is in the past ten years that i got introduced to social skills strategies and they have helped me a lot. I can arrive at an understanding quite quickly - sometimes - these days - but i still have to work at it in a very different way to people who are not ASD people. I think Greentea makes a very valid point, the more i think about it - with the way people do play with language.

one thing i would say however. some AS people play with language and do things with it too. There's a few damned fine writers about who had this capacity. there has been inference that one of the world's greatest poets (in my view) was AS....w.b yeats. and then there is the philospher Wittgenstein - whose philosophy WAS a philosophy of language. IT is not proven they had AS, but from accounts, it seems likely. As a creative aspie (terrible typo's but i assure you i can spell - my fingers fumble though with typing on the keyboard,) who has won an award for writing, we maybe need to keep this in mind in order to cease the stereotypical vew that ALL people with AS are science or maths or stats geeks.

it is a good thread because it is a thread about skills and learning. thanks greentea. and it stimulates the debate and makes things clearer.

my early teens were hell - absolute hell, and by twenty i was wrongly put into a psych ward. As GReentea points out re languagea nd words -- there are so many things to be done with it. MY teens WAS hell because of the alphabet soup i lived in. People were communicating, faces chatting, all these words swimming around and this terror because I was trying to grasp what was being said. I knew there were many options and i spent almost the entirety of my mental time trying to work it out. I can see the alphabet soup now - swirling around in my movie screen mind - all these letters, words, tumbling and flitting and i was stuck in the middle trying to snatch a meaning here and there. I really do worry about younger people with AS sometimes. So good to have a thread that can help.

and we can and do imporve. but it is a choice issue. each person has to work out whether they want to fathom some of this stuff, and also come to an acceptance that he or she will NEVER be able to understand it all in quite the same manner as people who are not on the spectrum.

You know, Greentea, there is a great way to think about it. Non verbal language is the real life smilies! (emoticons ) Well, of course it is the other way around... Emoticons are online equivalents of real life non verbal signals. They were invented (by NTs) for precisely this purpose!
Noticed that there are no "come closer" and "go away" emoticons?


True. But it`s not always so. For ex, "I like you" signal - you make eye contact and smile. This is all.



What makes you think so?

what i've come to realize is that the words are usually not the whole package to NTs. thus when i say things and don't include certain body language or some kind of implied subtext, they will make it up to fill in the gap.

someone posted on my mommy board that they had overheard the following in the women's restroom:

"oh, wow, i really like that dress, just not that color, i would never wear that color."

- person wearing cute dress is offended.

- person overhearing said conversation posts, "i wonder what on earth she could have meant by that comment?"

- several members post about what a rude, obnoxious thing it was to say.

- i post, "she meant, 'oh, wow, i really like that dress, just not that color, i would never wear that color.' nothing more, nothing less and it's totally something that would come out of my mouth."

i get into this kind of trouble all the time.