A Way with Words

 

Mum was a master crossword solver. The books tell you that crossword puzzles and other word and number games help stave off alzheimers.  Perhaps if mum hadn’t been such an avid crossword addict she would have succumbed to alzheimers earlier than she did. When she retired  her day would start with the crossword. She might finish it quickly in which case there were other word games and Sudoku in the same newspaper; or you might find her at midday still puzzling over one of the clues surrounded by thesaurus, dictionary and encyclopaedia.  She always got there in the end .

And even when she first arrived in Sri Lanka  and I was doing crossword puzzles by the beach, she could still have a go and get the odd one or two. These days though she doesn’t try.   Working in the field of English language teaching I am on one level professionally interested in what is happening to her language. On a personal level it is very sad. She always had a range and depth of vocabulary to be envied. These days though there are a lot of signs that her language ability is not just diminishing but disappearing.

Every three months she has an appointment with the neurologist,  a calm Indian gentleman with a lovely friendly manner. We visited him last week. He tests her memory .  Her visual ability is fine. She can still copy diagrams quite successfully.  Reality is a puzzle though. She has no clue as to day,  month or time.  Thankfully he didn’t ask her where she was as I’m sure she would have said Wishaw or Edinburgh.  She scored really badly on two areas: naming things in a group and remembering  4 simple words 5 minutes after being given them. Asked to name as many animals as she could in a minute, with serious prompting she managed cat and dog.  Remembering  4 words even when she had said them a few times with the neurologist was almost impossible. Even with serious prompting she only got 1 out of 4.

She loves language; but increasingly she has issues.  She forgets the names of things; so squirrels become wriggly things; the BBC news on tv becomes the newspaper;  sky and sea become blue stuff. Things that have specific names become  generic, collective or more high frequency things. For example, lorries become cars, glasses , cups.  Pool and pond become confused. “Were you in that pond?” She says of the Fortress pool.  She is losing pronoun use. This manifests itself in gender confusion where kids are concerned. Himashi down south who is a little three year old girl, is invariably talked about as “he”. Arran, the baby in Colombo, is mostly referred to as “she”.  I suppose it’s not a surprise as neither of them really wear gender specific clothes. Himashi prefers to run about in as little as possible – although when going out visiting with the family can be clearly seen in a dress. Arran is usually in a one piece. So perhaps the pronoun confusion is understandable.

She is though almost desperately hanging on to language and she still gets enjoyment out of it. She names things all the time.  “’Flying fish,” she declares at the start of the drive south last Friday. I’m not sure how I am meant to reply to that. She had seen it on a shop. “Cow” she’ll exclaim as one crosses the road in front of us. “Dog,” as one is spotted in the middle of the highway. This usually produces a conversation of “Dead dog?”, (referring to a time when there were lots of dead dogs on the highway), “No, I think it’s sleeping.”  “Don’t drive down the hole,” she says quite a lot. This refers to the drainage ditches alongside most roads in Sri Lanka.  “Caravan – that’s not a caravan,” she says, referring to the brand name of the van in front of us. She reads everything, the ticker tape across  the BBC news, TV programme names at the bottom of the tv screen (though she has no hope of following the actual programme) , the Ceylinco Insurance sign on top of a building outside the apartment window in Colombo, any and all shops signs, license numbers of vehicles in front of us she takes particular delight in reciting especially if they have double numbers, the places on the buses (that can be tricky – Ambalangoda, Karapitiya -  but she’ll have a go). Her ability to read certainly is not deteriorating. Her ability to remember and use language accurately certainly is.