When autism first started to be diagnosed, people thought of autistic people as nonverbal, or acquiring verbal skills slowly and haltingly. This stereotype still persists and is part of the reason why many autists are missed or dismissed, if they seem to have good verbal skills. Sometimes these autists are called “hyperverbal.” I feel like I want to make a Hannah Gadsby joke about this being a complete misunderstanding of “hyperverbal.” I had a lot of words, and I knew exactly what they meant — except that I didn’t. At all. Understand what words were for.
Being hyperverbal as a child often looks like a kid studying a dictionary (something I did with vigor — learning the longest word in the English language, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, in elementary school and being delighted to tell adults what it meant and how to spell it. Precisely. Being hyperverbal meant raising my hand to correct every teacher who misspoke and the other students, as well. Being hyperverbal meant reading way over my grade level for many, many years, with no one really asking me if I wanted to read The Three Musketeers when I was eleven or if I really understood what was going on in “To Build A Fire” at age ten. It meant being confused when people used language crudely and imprecisely, or when they made fun of me using words that did not make any sense to me.
