"it's Matt Damon. Or possibly Mark Whalburg -- like anyone can tell them apart"

Matt is hotter.


So if you hate slow speakers so much, have you ever listened to any of Churchill's speeches? Painful.

 

I'm with Lanthanide on this one, Matt Damon is way hotter!

Your description of writing with pen and paper is a pretty accurate description of the way my writing looks as well. I can remember a time when my writing used to look fairly good. Never John Hancock on the constitution pretty, but legible at least. Now it seems that every letter I write in lower case looks exactly the same, with the exception of the y's. I have to really concentrate to keep my writing legible, and find it easier -albeit much slower- to use block print when leaving notes for myself or others. The downside to that is that I scrimp on words because it takes so damn long. Right now I have a post-it note on my desk that has three words on it: Banana, Cat, Lampshade. I know why I wrote down lampshade, the other two are beyond me. If I had written it instead of printing it, I could just assume that it was something terribly important that was since forgotten. Instead, I have to spend the rest of my day pondering banana cat.

 

Sorry Flux, but I'm going to pull out the "people who seem stupid aren't always stupid" card. I too tend to talk real fast--sometimes so fast I stumble over my own tongue and end up having to rewind so I can repeat myself to those listeners. For me, that's mostly a physical issue of me slurring my words together and not annunciating--I know very well what I want to say, but I'm just not moving my lips well enough.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, has Ausberger's Syndrome, so she's the perfect poster child of "words not coming out fast enough." In casual conversation she's "normal" (as far as general defitions go) but if I try to get her to explain something specific and concise, she goes blank. For the next 60 seconds she'll spit out words and half-phrases of what she's "trying to say she means." Often she'll tell me the end result of what she's trying to say before explaining the natural progression up there, which leaves us both confused, because now we both know the answer but still doesn't know how to achieve it. Kind of like getting the answer to a mathematical process first--okay, now I know the number, but I need to know how you got there so I can understand the process and put two and two together in my own head.

This is important to me, because my girlfriend and I are quite devoted to each other, so austistic, slow-speaking children are almost a certainty. I do have comfort knowing that my girlfriend's ability to arrive at the answer--not just in math, but everywhere--before going through the natural motions of progression means she's quite intelligent in that head of hers; there's just a misconnection between the tongue and the brain, so the rest of the world wonders what the hell is wrong. This theory of mine is further supported by her writing, which is almost always coherent.

 

I'm in the "eloquent writer, bumbling speaker" camp. I'm a fairly well-spoken individual with a keyboard at my fingertips (by God, I have the same problem you have with pen and paper. Those hand cramps are a bitch!), but once I get in front of someone, I'm a fairly monosyllabic conversationalist unless we're pretty well acquainted.

I've also noted about myself that I have a pretty healthy lexicon, and neat words always come out before their simpler counterparts, but I can almost *never* invoke the cool words in conversation. 9 times out of 10 I know an awesome word exists for what I'm trying to say, but it simply doesn't come to me. This, as you may have guessed, doesn't occur on paper.

As a result of this, I'm a very quiet individual, and I equate intellect with silence coupled with the impression of understanding; if I see them smiling at intelligent jokes or convincingly acting as though they're following complex concepts (though not actively participating in conversation), I assume intelligence, because that is pretty much how I am.