What does it mean to call a talent strange or useless, as the Long & Short Reviews prompt does? If it's a talent, how bad is it for people to call it useless?
I'm not sure but I suggest, Gentle Readers, that if someone else tells you your talent is strange or useless, you maintain a good healthy distance from that person. For their kind of contagious mental illness a hundred miles is a good distance.
People used to tell women that any talents we had were, if not useless, if in fact what was keeping our children alive, at least strange. It was strange for women to be able to live, much less bring up children, without depending on some man. As technology made even labor jobs accessible to women, we just stopped listening to this toxic idea, and everyone's much better off without it.
Men, however, may now be getting messages from envious fellow males that it's "strange," or "White" or "girly," to have talents that involve communication. Lowest-common-denominator groups of guys can't claim that math is a "girly" talent (though they can claim that it's "White") because a real talent for math is genetic, and almost always found in men. When consistent differences in the IQ scores of different demographic groups persist after the poverty factor has been eliminated, the differences correlate nicely with the incidence of "the math gene" in different groups. "The math gene" is more often found in Asia than in Europe, more often in Europe than in Africa, but it is global. In fields that involve communication, however, John Adams was right. He feared that "On the day women are our equals" (under the law) "they will be our masters," that if women had equal access to education and publication and such we'd dominate those fields...as we did, and do.
For anyone who's read the writing of women of past generations it is at least funny to see how quickly and completely the tables have turned. Many of the greatest writers in English were men; but the majority of English-speaking men never were writers. Isn't there something delicious about \the number of publishers who are still calling for manuscripts by women and members of minority lobbying groups (as distinct from real minorities that aren't big enough to do so much lobbying)...but won't read manuscripts that are admittedly by White men?
There is, but it's still not right. It's a scenario that belongs in "revenge porn." In the real world White men deserve their chance to use their talents, just as everybody else does. Christians who show what Freud would have called a revealing obsession with other people's sex lives may need to be reminded that Jesus is not recorded to have preached on that topic at all, while He told a story that was recorded three times--which means He may have told it three hundred times--about the punishment of someone who, through cowardice, didn't use his talent for profit.
There are, of course, abilities like double-jointedness for which humanity has yet to find very much use. I don't usually think of things like double-jointedness, or sleepwalking, or the ability to grow hair more than three feet long, as talents. I think of them as quirks, but they may be talents. Super-long hair, for instance, tends to be strong durable hair. It didn't do much for Absalom but, if nothing else, it can be harvested every few years to make wigs.
I have the quirk of extra-flexible hands. I have two visible tendons in each wrist that flex independently when I type and allow my middle and ring fingers to move independently. I also have the ability to touch the inside of each wrist with at least some of the fingers on the same side hand. Whether this has actually helped me type, I don't know. Back when there were typing competitions, I used to win them. That might be called a strange talent I have, but I suspect it's not been altogether useless. I suspect most of the quirks people inherit have some sort of use, whether people use them or not.
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