http://www.partiallyclips.com/pages/archive.php?id=1335&b=1

bovo-aspergia

I couldn't find a def for aspergia?

asperge - to sprinkle especially with holy water

ah, I haven't seen A Beautiful Mind...

thanks.

Asperger's (I suspect it's named after the guy who codified it) is one of those syndromes in the autism spectrum that mostly affects adults (I think -- WCB*LIU).

*we could both

(eta, I would read A Beautiful Mind first -- the movie romanticizes it too much. Oh, no! There's a concept! )

Nope. Asperger's is indeed within the autism spectrum, but is not limited to adults. Asperger's is arguably not distinct from autism, but the experts go either way on that. People (including children; our school district recently wanted to diagnose my younger son with Asperger's, but that's another story) with Asperger's suffer from lesser disabilities that those labeled autistic; typically, although they have the social, physical and perceptual problems of other autistics, Asperger's people are much less disabled with language processing.

If you drew a bell curve representing the autism spectrum, the profoundly autistic -- never advance out of diapers, never utter a word -- are at the tale end of one side if the curve, and the Asperger's are at the opposite end.

Asperger's syndrome was indeed first described by Hans Asperger. Coincidently, another researcher -- Leo Kanner -- was independently describing the same group of symptoms, and both named the condition "autism". It appears that Asperger's subject group (not randomly selected from the population) happened to consist of people moderately disabled, while Kanner's included more profoundly disabled people, and in 1981, another researcher used the "Asperger's" label to describe the subgroup of lesser disabled people.

... for your explanation.