Riley S. Faelan<p>Not being mentally handicapped was actually pretty common among the children; they were just lumped into a single facility because there used to be a time in Canada when all disabilities looked alike to an able person, especially a powerful able person in position to organise such facilities. And yet, to the author, reinforcing the power hierarchy <em>while she's working on alleviating it</em> is strangely important.</p><p>I kind of suspect that a lot of the children went on learning to use some form of written English (or French, because Canada) eventually, and ended up reading many interesting Standard Books(tm). Yet, this sort of stuff is annoying.</p><p>Maybe it would be useful to write books on "advanced topics", like the weird animals that Darwin saw when he sailed around the world, or how to calculate the volume of a sphere and a cone using infinitesimals and/or limits, in Blissymbolics and Toki Pona's <em>sitelen pona</em>, specifically so as to smash the Patriarchy's ideas about "simple and primitive" languages.</p><p>(Even though it's no longer 1981, you can still see these ideas applied to creole and/or pidgin languages, as a part of looking down upon the people of recent personal or familiar migratory history with whom such languages are often associated with.)</p><p>:blobcatreading: <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/bookstodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>bookstodon</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/conlang" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>conlang</span></a></p>