"Gust" from Dory to Lilly

This will be a short one, but I just wanted to tell you something neato.

So I was pondering the word "disgusting" the other day.  There are three parts to the word: "dis," "gust," and "ing," two of which we know the meaning of. "Dis-" means something along the same lines as "un-" or "not."  "-ing" turns a word into an adjective or gerund (or a verb if you want to get less technical.)  Basically, the word tells us that the thing we're describing is not...whatever "gust" means.  Which means "gust" meant something at some point in our language's history, probably something to do with taste.

At this point in my thought process, the very similarly-sounding French word "dégoûtant" (pronounced day-goot-on) popped into my head--it's the French word for "disgusting," and if you recall my post about the accent circonflexe, the accent circonflexe, seen here above the 'u,' indicates pretty reliably that there used to be an s right there.  AND, the cool thing about the word "dégoûtant" is that "goût" means "taste" in French.

So, if you followed all of that, you may decide to hypothesize along with me that there used to be a word in English, "gust," that meant "taste."

Having brought my thought process that far, it occurred to me that I should, like, test this theory.  So I consulted our best friend the Oxford English Dictionary and found this:

SUCCESS.

:D

"Visualization" from Dory to Lilly

Lillah, something happened in my Teaching Literature class today that made me question myself.

This is a good thing, I suppose, since we should always question our most dearly held assumptions when striving for more education.  But still, I feel extremely uncomfortable in thinking that I may not be as awesome a reader as I thought I was.

Namely, I don't visualize while reading.  There is no movie playing in my head.  We've been talking a lot in class about how to teach various "reading strategies"--stuff like predicting, making inferences, activating background knowledge, and visualizing.  I am ready to accept that visualizing can indeed be a useful strategy while reading, but personally I don't find it terribly useful.

Now, this is strange, because in other areas I'm an extremely visual person.  I like photography and art.  I draw comics to help me make sense of hard concepts.  My notes in class usually look something like this:

When I write in books it looks like this:

And when I plan out essays it looks like this:

So, I have no idea why I don't visualize what I'm reading--it's not something I ever did, or considered necessary for understanding or enjoying a book.  When I admitted this to a couple classmates, one of them asked, "Wait, so what IS going on in your head?"  Well,  other stuff.  It's not that I'm not engaged with the text, it's just that the visual details aren't terribly important to me in the face of things like emotions, relationships between characters, and the craft of the words themselves.

It seems to be this very closely-held tenant of teaching literature that students MUST LEARN HOW TO VISUALIZE THE TEXT, and I'm rather questioning that.  Am I just weird, or are there other people out there that find visualization not only unnecessary, but distracting?

Because seriously, having a movie playing in my head while reading sounds terribly distracting.

So, do you visualize?  Is it really like a movie constantly playing in your head?  I just can't even imagine that....

Explain this to me please, sister. o_0

Love, Dory