The Daily Tism

Autistic man refutes the defamatory accusation that he’s overly loquacious to the point of being unintelligible

Added 2025-03-14 11:00:05 +0000 UTC

Piece by Sara Gibbs and Andrew Hickey, Image Shutterstock

An autistic man has thoroughly rebuffed the allegation that his speech is excessively verbose to the point of being impossible to parse.

In a statement released today, Dexter Livingstone, 32, admitted to his eloquence but disputed the claim by Paige Thomas, 19, that his use of long words made it difficult to understand him.

Livingstone said: “I am incandescent at the idea that my verbiage is overly loquacious, even sesquipedalian. This is as fallacious as the similarly groundless claim from persnickety lackwits that my linguistic expression is somehow archaic, nay antediluvian. This is the kind of pettifoggery up with which I shall not put."

Livingstone, who learned to read when he was two but didn't make a close friend until the age of twenty-five, continued "I merely attempt to find, as Flaubert put it, le seul mot juste. How one can attempt to communicate with precision, when one is enjoined from polysyllabic diction at the behest of hemidemisemiliterate ignorami, I cannot begin to fathom. If an interlocutor lacks the necessary intellectual facilities to comprehend my utterances, surely that should be taken as an opportunity for education, for that greatest prize for the autodidact, a datum to add to one's corpus?"

When asked for a rebuttal, Thomas responded "I just need to know if he wants fries or not. He's holding up the queue."