Dyslexia is a fashionable disease and a small industry amongst the western middleclasses. In reality the disease is restricted to very few people and consists in the braininterpreting writing that which is from left to right as from right to left. So a dyslexicperson would read 'god' as 'dog'. The fashion arises as an excuse for children who areslow with their reading.
The inability to read as other children of the same age do is not seen for what it is -bad teaching, deficient initiation or just a perfectly natural and acceptable longer spanof absorption of the particular skills that go into reading. It has to be put down to abrain defect. Hence the rush to dyslexia clinics, which eventually do succeed in teachingchildren to read and cite their success as proof that the dyslexia existed and wasscientifically 'cured'.
A boy in my class at school had a very selective dyslexic manifestation (common to manyIndians). He would read and say 'sk' as 'ks' and the other way round. So 'ask' wouldalways be 'aks'. We would ask [or 'arks'] him to say "the eskimo escaped with extrawhisky". 'Exclamation' with its 'kskl' Gordian knot was an impossibility.
The evidence that this inability to negotiate an 'x' can become permanent is to befound in the forms of the name which different languages have for the Macedonian Princeand conqueror - Alexander. He is called 'Sikander' as he moves through Arabia and Persiato the Punjab, dyslexising the 'ks' into 'sik'. Further East in the stronghold of Urdu, alanguage which has made a game of linguistic accuracies, he undergoes the furtherindignity of being metamorphosed to 'Iskander'.
(A column on Indian words in common use in Indian cities.)
