Have I mentioned what a fan I am of the Czech menu of disabilities? You’ve heard of dyslexia, I’m sure. I have met a couple of people who suffer from it, and it seems real enough. Though I don’t claim to understand it’s mechanisms, I can easily believe that such a disorder exists. I can even imagine how awful it must be to have the disorder called dysgraphia, which is a physiological or neurogical inability to write properly. I imagine it must be some sort of noise in the feedback loop between brain and hand. Fine so far. But then we have dysorthographia which, if you parse it, could only be a medical diagnosis for people with bad penmanship. And then there’s dyscalculia, for people who have difficulty in math. I actually do believe in dyscalculia: If dyslexics can somehow reverse the letters in a word, as strange as it sounds to someone who is unafflicted, why should it not be possible for others to reverse the digits in a number? Of course, discalculia need not only refer to such a specific condition; I can imagine the term as a blanket diagnosis that refers to people, some of whom I’ve met personally, who have inordinate difficulty with mathematical reasoning. If dyscalculia is simply a label applied to people who are medically sensitive to math, however, I remain skeptical.

What surprises me is the Google ratio for these terms:

In the country where the rigorous study of penmanship begins at age 6, it is not surprising that dysorthographia is almost as commonly mentioned as dyslexia. Of course, I do not claim to have presented an airtight case proving anything except my own surplus of free time, but it is an interesting discovery nonetheless. Thanks, by the way, to Larry and Sergey, who apparently are still keepin’ it real.

ehn, crosseyed and painless. bwah-hah-hah.

your picture's showing up now, and what a fine figure of a man you are.

ooh, and you put up a counter, now you can see how many times i visit. also your SILENT LOSER FRIENDS who DON'T COMMENT. maybe they're just, uhm, discommentix or something. i HATE it when people don't comment.

There are now 123 hits on google.com, on 18 on the new beta scholar.google.com. But, alas, Strange Proportion for some odd reason doesn't make the cut in the Beta.

I have the explanation for you: dysorthographia is mostly referred to as dyslexia. If you want to play word games try Greek: dyslexia is about reading, and dysorthographia about writing. Most Dyslectics have problems with both, but dyslexia-dysorthographia disorder is such a long word. I guess the Czechs are the only ones who can keep their terminality straight.

Someone who is not a native English speaker has attempted to start a Wikipedia page on dysorthographia. Please, folks, help out if you know anything about it.

Dysorthographia is a disorder of learning characterized by an important and durable defect of assimilation of grammatical rules (deterioration of the spontaneous writing or under dictation).

Symptoms of dysorthographia in varied proportions:
A slowness , hesitations and a poverty of the writing
Grammar, conjugation, spelling mistakes
Difficulties with writing similar the dyslexic
Copy errors and arbitrary cuts of words
Savings in syllables, omissions and merged words

This disorder often follows upon a dyslexia but this is not systematic. It can be developmental (congenital) or acquired (following a lesion of the nervous system), in this last case the term agraphia is often used.