The title of comes from an untitled poem by e.e. cummings in which he criticized people in the thrall of social conformity. I love the word "unstrange." For me, it means two things. First, it can denote what we often call the "normal," but from the perspective of the different. It's great to reverse the way we think about "abnormal" by calling the "normal" unstrange. Second, it can denote the passage of people, like people with autism, from being "abnormal" to being familiar and understandable, rather than a mystery. I like to think that this is what is happening to people with autism. As the general public learns to understand and appreciate people with autism, the autistic person is no longer strange or foreign. He or she is, instead, unstrange. |
