Mihran Kalaydjian's Official Blog

As you know, this month, my blog theme is pet peeves.  Having autism (actually Asperger’s Syndrome), I also have some different types of pet peeves than other people.

One of the “biggies” on the list of symptoms of people with autism is that we are “exact word oriented.”  With a lot of autistic people (like both my children), this means that they might laugh at a joke because other people are laughing and they have learned that’s what they should be doing, but they have no idea why.  They also may not get idioms such as if they hear that someone “has skeletons in their closet.”  That makes no sense.  Did they kill people and the bodies decomposed in their closet?  How did this happen?

The autistic individuals who are exact word oriented might also not be able to gauge certain voice inflections.  They only hear words and apply the…