Some people view Twitter as the global internet chat room. Following that paradigm, if you track and listen to what is being said in Twitter you can get a good feeling of what the global community has to say about a particular topic…

So last week I decided to listen in, and hear what people have to say about dyslexic people. Besides the professional tweets, tweets about how to deal with dyslexia, I came across a more layman channel that used the term “dyslexic” in more mundane, day-to-day expressions.

Here are some of the expressions relating to dyslexics that I came across:

-          “If life hands you melons, you might be dyslexic”

-          “I just got dyslexic for a second. Tried to read a tweet and I read it wrong like 5 times.”

-          “My inability to tie a necktie leads me to wonder if I’m dyslexic?”

-          “That’s weird…I was like, dyslexic with SOUND!”

-          “I spent 20 minutes doing Running & Sweating Like a dyslexic on countdown”

-          “Most color blind people can see colors, they just mix them up. Shouldn’t they be called “color dyslexic”?”

-          ”Don’t buy a 70,000 car before you buy a house. That’s so dyslexic”

-          “Is your kindle dyslexic? Is that’s what’s wrong?”

-          “The best part about being 33 is that for the first time since I was 22 dyslexic people know my real age.”

-           “This new twitter is making me feel dyslexic, like my feed should be on the right side or something!”

The most popular re-tweet was “If life hands you melons, you might be dyslexic”. This sentence is actually a pun on a popular saying “If life gives you lemons make lemonade!” (which translate to if life is bitter, make something sweet). The pun here is on the word “lemons” – as people with dyslexia tend to jumble letters, so switching the word lemons to melons means you might be dyslexic… This tweet I found amusing and witty. (BTW – there is a facebook page called “If life hands you melons, you’re probably dyslexic” – with 11,281 people who liked the page (myself included)…

However, if you look at the other tweets, it seems that people were using the term “dyslexic” as reference to something or someone who is slow, broken, unable to perform simple tasks, verging on the stupid. To me that was worrying, because it seems that there is awareness and adoption of the term “dyslexic” by the general public, but in most cases the word “dyslexic” was being used in a negative connotation.

Such abuse of the word “dyslexic” may inadvertently lead to an unwarranted prejudice against people with dyslexia…

As I have no formal answer of how to change the perceived impressions of dyslexics by the general public, I will end this blog with a request from readers’ insights and a link to the video with a twist on the lemonade saying:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfnHJrU6uEo&fs=1&hl=en_US]