Reddit is wonderful, its a community full of pseudo-lonely teens and post-teens digesting the entirety of the internet and putting it into bite-size chunks, wonderfully categorszed to appeal to your exact taste. Reddit is free in both price and thought, and truly engaging. The hours of implied independent research trawling through page after page of inconsequential bullshit (the internet) that the hivemind does results in a masterpiece, "The Front Page of the Internet", it proclaims. It is these hours and these brave men who's research I shall be cheaply knocking off for a self-deprecating blogpost.
To be fair, I'm owed it. At what point does it become reasonable to have your social inadequacies shoved in your face? Reddit said "TIL [Today I Learned] that, when Washoe (the first chimpanzee to use sign language) was told that her caretaker's baby had died, she signed "CRY"."
The sympathy and humanity? I feel like I have a grasp on that. However that level of social awareness and general etiquette is one that I will never reach. I am a product of hundreds of generations of people who communicated and were immersed in language - I probably would have mustered a "shit..." and then descended into a pit of awkwardness. It is - at the very least - conceptually demanding that Washoe would be more adept at the social stuff (family gatherings, skype conversations, the horrible faux-metropolitan "our-lives-honestly-aren't-that-dull!" nightmare known as 'drinks') than me.
But then again, Washoe had game. She knew 350 words of sign language, recognised herself in the mirror and came up with thermos' short-lived rebranding "METAL CUP DRINK" so I don't feel too bad about it.
I'd recommend reading up on her, I had an identity crisis just watching this video.