A good friend of mine thinks that the way I habitually structure sentences, with lots of clauses and parentheticals and so forth, is in itself diagnostic of ADHD. I find this idea intriguing.
@adamgreenfield I am native of Italian. The culture there is of long sentences with lots of clauses. We always admired mastery over clarity in the use of language; Italian has two fathers, but one, Dante, is celebrated, whereas the other, Galileo Galilei, is only remembered as a scientist. 1/2
@adamgreenfield A rule of thumb in publishing is that the Italian translation of a book in English has 20% more pages. An obfuscating political language evolved, as the masses of the 1950s and 60s clearly appreciated it: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politichese?wprov=sfla1
@adamgreenfield when we were taught Latin in school, we started with fragments from Julius Caesar. A soldier, Caesar kept his chronicles to the point. As pupils got more advanced, we would be introduced to the much more flowery Cicero, a lawyer and master rhetor who aimed at persuasion over fact. And then we were told that the latter was the real gold standard. And that endures.
@adamgreenfield I do the same thing. I'm pretty #autistic, but I don't think I'm #ADHD (could be wrong). But I've always put it down to having academic parents who normally used quite sophisticated sentence structures in everyday conversation.
Mind you, I think that certainly my father, and probably both parents, were also to a considerable degree neurodivergent.
@simon_brooke@adamgreenfield I think one way complex (as opposed to chaotic) sentence structure can come about is if you grow up reading more than socializing, since language for speech and for writing is different. But reading more than socializing can happen if you are #ASD or #ADHD (if you couldn't focus enough on conversations when you were young), so that doesn't narrow it down.
@adamgreenfield imagining a “translation” of Kant into excited ADHD storyteller where digressions and mid-sentence definitions are announced with, - oh, right, that’s” instead of notre traditional and staid “, that is”.
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