with Lacan

Someone I work with recently told me what he’d learned about ancient Greek culture, and in particular the word ‘barbarian’. He told me that the modern sense of barbarians as those who are uncivilised was not particularly shared by the Greeks in their use of the word. He had read that for the Greeks, barbarians were simply those who were not Greeks, who spoke foreign languages, whose speech was not decipherable, sounding like bar-bar – bar-bar- ians. He told me that for him, being autistic is a bit like that. He lives among people whose speech he feels he does not decipher well, does not understand their mores, and is not understood in return. I looked up the etymology of this word, barbarian , and found indeed that the modern word dates to the mid C14th, as “foreign, of another nation or culture”, and from the 1590s, “of or pertaining to savages, rude, uncivilised”. This has a relation via Latin to the Greek barbaros “foreign, strange; ignorant”, or barbaroi – “all that are not Gree