Filling in the Blanks

When you hear like I do,  you are constantly filling in the blanks.  And when you’ve been hearing like I hear for as long as I have, you get pretty good at filling in the blanks.  Let me explain…

There are many word pairs that sound very similar to me/my brain.  For example:

loom – wound

lettuce – let us

send forth – send forks

scrolls – squirrels

Irenaeus (theologian) – urine on us

affect – effect

she – he

pants – dance

hooks – books

redress – regress

let – led

gun – done

This is just a quick list - things that have tripped me up in the last week or so.  At first glance, the words on that list look different enough from each other in meaning that it would be difficult to confuse them. But take a sentence like this, which I actually heard this week.  It was said by my mom, in reference to my 13 year old brother, who is rather accident prone (he doesn’t always think things all the way through) and who also weaves on a table top loom.

“I need to go help him redress/regress his loom/wound because it’s become un***n” (***  represent that I missed part of a word and had to fill in).  

I may have missed more than that, but don’t remember because the words were easy to fill in.  For example, I don’t think I heard all of the “him” or the “his” but they were easy to fill in because I knew she was talking about Isaac.  Based on what I heard/didn’t hear, I could have filled in the blanks in multiple ways, more than one of which made sense:

…redress his loom because it’s become undone

…redress his wound because it’s become undone

…redress his loom because it’s become uneven

...redress his wound because it’s become uneven

…regress his loom because it’s become undone

…regress his wound because it’s become undone

…regress his loom because it’s become uneven

...regress his wound because it’s become uneven

All of the options containing “regress” could be dropped quickly.  The word “regress” just didn’t make sense with the other words my brain tried to put in the sentence.  That still left me with four sentence options that made wonderful amounts of sense, but warranted two very different responses!

…redress his loom because it’s become undone

…redress his wound because it’s become undone

…redress his loom because it’s become uneven

...redress his wound because it’s become uneven

…regress his loom because it’s become undone

…regress his wound because it’s become undone

…regress his loom because it’s become uneven

...regress his wound because it’s become uneven

Had Isaac hurt himself or was his weaving project in jeopardy?

Acknowledging that I couldn’t fill in the blanks on my own and asking more questions led to the conclusion that Isaac was fine, his weaving on the loom had become uneven and she had to help him make it even again.

8 options for 1 sentence.  After my own work, 4 options for the 1 sentence.   For me, this is not unusual.  This is a part of my everyday life.  Every time I take in information using my ears, with or without the benefit of speech reading, I have to fill in blanks.

As frustrating and as confusing as this often is it is also a blessing.  I have a friend with a very similar hearing loss to me (different cause, similar results) and see agrees with both the frustrations and the blessings.

We are used to filling in the blanks.  This is great when you are learning a new language.  Because we are used to not hearing every word, when we try to learn a new language we don’t get upset about missing a word or two.  Of course, this has its downfalls too because we don’t always pay attention to the details such as gender and case (we miss most of them in our first language, why should we worry about small details such as gender and case?!?!). Naturally, once you get passed the beginning stages of a language, this becomes a problem.

Honestly there was no huge point to this post.  Just thought maybe someone would be interested in what it’s like to hear like me, so maybe you can understand why I sometimes ask questions that make no sense or respond inappropriately.  Cuz sometimes, I fill in the blanks wrong.