Ear: Another damn thing that can fall apart
A sad tale of age and decrepitude, with a little etymology thrown in
I was 10 when I got my first pair of glasses. I don’t remember much about the process leading up to the event; I certainly don’t remember struggling to see clearly, so I imagine I just assumed that the fuzzy world I encountered was a function of the actual world actually being a little fuzzy.
If so, the older I get, the more prescient I think the young me must have been.
One thing I do remember is enjoying being the bespectacled centre of attention at school for a day or two. Rather than bullying or teasing me, my classmates thought my new appendages made me more interesting. I agreed, and also thought they made me look more intelligent. From that point, I embarked on a lifetime of always having to be the smart one in the room, a strong suit which, I was later to learn at great cost, can be less than charming on dates.
What I also didn’t appreciate at the time is that the eyes are a microcosm of the whole. Amazing as it is, the human body has an unfortunate habit of reaching its physical peak way too early before incrementally and inexorably failing over time. One by one and little by little, body parts begin to sag, creak, harden, wrinkle, enlarge, migrate from their appointed place, tighten when they should be loose and loosen when they should be tight, weaken, diminish, erupt, erode, and otherwise deteriorate until, one day, we notice that the shining edifice that was once us has become a decrepit building barely fit for habitation.
Thus it was last week that I found my 65-year-old self shut in a tiny soundproofed booth inside an only slightly larger office undergoing a hearing test. I was taken care of by a delightful young man named Jerico who not only seemed to know exactly what he was about, but went to just the right lengths (neither patronising nor glib) to keep me in the picture and, when the depressingly predictable results came in, explain what they indicated and what could be done about it.
It seems my ears have no problem with volume. Talk to me quietly, and I’ll hear you. What they’ve become crap at is distinguishing higher pitched sounds. In conversation, these tend to be the consonants at the beginning and end of words, especially your p’s, s’s, k’s and t’s. The upshot is that if you’re talking to me, although I may hear you, I won’t necessarily know whether you’re saying pit, sit, kit or breast. Cue long-suffering wife joke, except it turns out that my long-suffering wife has borne the brunt of this shortcoming and it hasn’t been especially funny for her.
As you’d expect, ear is a word whose history goes back as far as it’s possible for us to peer; that is, to Proto-Indian-European or PIE, spoken as early as 4500 BCE. There, it’s believed to have been ous, which became auris in Latin, which gives us smart-sounding modern words like aural.
Guessing if a word has its origins in PIE is a fairly easy game. Imagine you’re living in a world with next to no technology by modern standards and ask yourself what would be some of the categories you’d absolutely need language for in order to function. External body parts would be among them, for sure. Family and social relationships would be another. Names for plants, animals and objects found in nature would be essential, a few pronouns would probably be handy, as would words for counting things. Wikipedia, one of my favourite inventions ever (thank you Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales), provides this handy page of what it calls “many of the most fundamental PIE words and roots”. I recommend it.
During my hearing test, Jerico told me he’d recently attended a conference where he learned that the way people with hearing loss compensate - namely, by using non-verbal clues like context and mouth movement - does two things, neither of them good.
First, the frontal lobe - which is not designed for listening - begins picking up some of the slack for the temporal lobe, which is designed for listening but isn’t receiving enough information to do the job adequately. (Neurologists call this “cross modal plasticity”.) Over time, the brain becomes wired to operate in this kludgy way. Pop a pair of hearing aids on someone with such a brain and they may be distressed by the now unfamiliar cognitive load being placed on their temporal lobe. Some people prefer to put up with partial deafness as a result.
Second, using the frontal lobe to decode speech is hard work. Consequently, people in my shoes can tire easily and, if the issue isn’t sorted, may also be more prone to cognitive decline (a nice way of saying we become candidates for dementia).
Call me a sucker for a good sales pitch, but forking over a couple of grand for a decent pair of hearing aids suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I couldn’t sign on the dotted line fast enough.
I count myself lucky. For one thing, even the cheapest hearing aids are beyond the reach of many people. While I’d rather be spending this money in a more wasteful manner, I at least have a choice.
What’s more, if I’d been born a few decades earlier, no amount of dosh would have offered anything like an elegant solution. Until recently, hearing aids were cumbersome, fiddly things that were also inclined to add unpleasant noises of their own to whatever external sound they were amplifying, making them questionable substitutes for simply turning up the tv and to hell with everyone else, or asking people to repeat themselves, only louder.
The first fully digital, miniaturised, wearable hearing aids were developed in the 1980s. In a joyous explosion of technological innovation, they offered “a bidirectional interface with an external computer, self-calibration, self-adjustment, wide bandwidth, digital programmability, a fitting algorithm based on audibility, internal storage of digital programs, and fully digital multichannel amplitude compression and output limiting”. I barely understand a word of that, which is also brought to you by my friends at Wikipedia, but let me tell you I’m jolly glad to be among those who, purely by an accident of birth, don’t have to miss out on any of it.
Ever the optimist, I’m also certain that just as my first pair of glasses did, my first pair of hearing aids will make me much more interesting. I, and my long-suffering wife, can hardly wait.
Bits and specious
RIP Norman Lear, creator of 1970s sitcom All in the Family and a host of other shows that dealt with sensitive political and social issues. I was in my early teens when All in the Family began screening in New Zealand and I loved everything about it. Archie Bunker, the protagonist, was a mirror for ultra conservative society at the time, and Lear performed the wonderful feat of making him both boorish and lovable. I occasionally catch reruns and I can tell you it still stands up. Lear was active right up until his death at the grand age of 101. Way to go.
Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie Bunker, was a gifted actor. In the late 80s he played police chief Bill Gillespie on crime drama series In the Heat of the Night, where he was every bit as powerful as he’d been in his earlier comic role. He is still the only male actor to have won the lead actor Emmy Award in both the comedy and drama series categories.
If you’re a professional writer and haven’t yet been asked by a client what you make of AI-slash-ChatGPT, don’t worry, you will be. If you’d like to have a ready answer that makes you look like a genius, you could do worse than read this piece by Paul Bloom.
Quote of the week
“You didn’t know your dog was deaf?” “No, we thought it was stupid.”
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood