Marathon Of Weird: Day 1

Friday, December 15, 2006

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.

1. No translating out loud. Ever.
2. No farting. Ever.
3. Never teach a girl how to backspeak. Ever.

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.

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Permanent Link: Marathon Of Weird: Day 1
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