I've come up for air. rof a thaerb, you might say.
:)
Though I mentioned this, very briefly, in passing the other day, it is weird enough to kick off the Marathon of Weird.
I can speak backwards. One friend and I do it so fluently that we regularly slip in and out of backspeak without noticing. We started doing it sometime around 1987 or so.
This all started when a few of us got the bright idea that we wanted to be able to talk to each other about girls without the girls in our Mormon ward knowing what we were saying. It doesn't take much thinking to understand now why I never developed any skill for speaking to women in a way that they could understand.
There were three rules for speaking backwards.
At one point or another, everyone breaks rule 1. It is too easy to do. Someone will say, "Evig em a llac worromot". Instinctively, you'll say, "Worromot? Worromot? Oh! Tomorrow... Give me a call tomorrow! Ooops".
Rule number 2 isn't really practical. It seemed smart at the time though.
Now, for the first time ever, I will publicly violate rule number 3.
The basic concepts for backspeak are pretty simple.
Only words are spoken backwards. Sentences remain in their regular English order.
To make reversing complex words simpler, prefixes are reversed first and kept at the start of the word. Then the root is reversed. The root is followed by the suffix, which remains in tact. So, the word "unenviable" becomes "nu-yvne-able". Some words are, obviously, more straightforward than others.
There's some debate about whether words are reversed phonetically or by their actual spelling. As a result, some words are pronounced a little bit differently depending on who is doing the speaking. This is what most frequently leads to a Rule 1 violation.
"ee-calp"
"ee-calp?"
"Place."
"Oh, you mean, saylp".
The only hard and fast rule on this issue is to do whatever is easiest. Hey, we were like 13. What do you expect, Esperanto?
After not too much work, we had it down pretty well. We were saying things like, "Ainrofilac si ym emoh etats. Ti si eth looc-est ecalp ni eth dlrow" and "Asil Yelckub si eth toh-est lrig I wonk. I tnaw ot regnif gnab reh... niaga."
The problem, as obvious as it seems to me now, wasn't so obvious then. The girls didn't think we were cool or clever. They thought we were excluding them. See, what I didn't know was that women are social. If you want them to like you, you have to include them, share your feelings with them, and actually show them that you are more interested in them than you are in, say, programming your Commodore 64 or blowing things up with firecrackers.
If you're reading this, Sherry Casper, Aimee Hackett, Tiffany Geurts, Annette Wilde, the Borden Twins and all the rest of you Quail Hollow Ward girls... we really, really liked you. I swear we did.
Now, I can only hope that you can understand me a little bit better.
OK, as promised, I will tag Danny, a fellow back-speaker, with the challenge to tell his story about "humping the T". Along with your personal experience, I expect illustrations and examples about both the possible ways the T can be humped.
Filed under - Friends | Marathon Of Weird | MiscSpeaking backwards? Though thinking about it makes my head hurt, I do find it to be somewhat impressive.
Quail Hollow Ward? I grew up pretty dang close to you.
Just tell me you were that anonymous girl from the region dances who always wanted to make out but would never tell me her name :)
I have faithfully fulfilled my tagging assignment and posted GRAPHIC 3D instructions on how to butter the bread without stabbing it.
http://sumwun.blogspot.com
Yah... the Quail Hollow Ward...to all the girls I (should have) loved before.
So much for a life without regrets...DAMNIT!
Dude, it never ceases to amaze me where I run into other fellow C64 geeks. :)
Oh, and the speaking backward thing is cool. I tried it off and on myself several times, but never enough to get good at it.
And I never came out and told girls I liked them either until way too late in life. My loss. If only I knew then what I know now, eh?
The C64 was the best selling single computer model until the iMac. There are a lot of us out there.
I chalk up how little I knew about girls to youth and inexperience. I would use the "milk before meat" analogy but I can't stop giggling when I do.
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Alright I will make a PBS special about the T and post it on http://sumwun.blogspot.com
Fucking tagged!
uoy nos fo a tchib! tahw ni eth dlrow erew uoy knithing?
(see I keep the th and tch together...kind of phonetic)
Yah we should have just said what you said backward...forwards to all the women. I'd rather have all their attention at the cost of being in trouble with God, The Church and the Parents..and the Angels...those voyeurs, and these witnesses...who watch apparently.