773: The Longest Distance Between Two Points
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Cassidy's 10, 5th grade. At the end of the school year, he's one of the talented extra-farts singing in front of everybody, parents and kids with his band. Okay, but here's something that's hard for him. Reading. He'll be okay for stretches, you know, when he already knows the words. One day, the sun shone so it was not cold, so cold. But he has dyslexia, so reading an unfamiliar word, he has to decode it. If it's a big word that I've never seen before, like that word, I don't know what that says. Okay, let's walk through that one. Wait, duh, duh, wait, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Here, talk me through what you're doing, so you're getting the duh. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. If you didn't, like, in the recording in my year, may you say bed. Thinking of the word bed is a way to keep Bs and Ds straight. This is actually one of the toughest things for Cassidy to learn. Bs and Ds, when they're not capitalized. Bs and Ds, they look the exact same, but just flipped. If you took a B, it can also be a D, and it was just super annoying for a long while. So it's easy to get them confused. Yeah. So there's this trick that lots of people just like to see at the top, they picture the word bed, which, if you think about it, it kind of looks like a bed. Like the posts of the B and the D are like the footboard and the headboard of the bed, and then the E is kind of the mattress. I picture the letters, and I go bo for B, E, and then duh, and then boom. There are so many little rules and tricks like this that some kids with Sucksier use. They have all kinds of names. The fizzle rule, the floss rule, short vowel protectors, welded sounds. These are the rules of the English language that most of us somehow absorb, but we are not aware of. The mechanics of when to use a long vowel or a short vowel, when G or G, H, or silent, they were in dozens of these, and then wield them like tools, one after another, to decode how a word should sound. Then E, M. Anyway, back to decoding this word. De-vass. Which, by the way, the word he's trying to read is devastating. De-vass. What is V-A-S-T? How about that sound? De-vass. Wait. Oh, vass. De-vass. Mm-hmm. Then A-T. And at in.
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