I attended a lecture by Geoff Plant, AO about Music perception for Cochlear Implantees. Some of the discussion was very interesting.

No we're not talking about the cutlery drawer. Language is fun and these are some of the fun and funny things we do with it.

What does the funny word Mondegreen mean and where does it come from? Read on to find out.

One of the things I hated, when I was deaf, was when a friend would say "hey have you heard this story it was so funny". Too often I missed the humour and especially the punch line.

Onomatopoeia's a big word, funny to say and even harder to spell. The dictionary definition is “the formation of a word by imitation of the sound”. So this means a word sounds like a sound.

I had been living deaf for about 10 years when I decided I had to do something about it

I was born to hear. I learned language at my mother’s knee and attended main stream schools. I had everything going for me and deafness didn't even enter into it. The sense of loss was enormous and I almost lost myself.

We know that there have been deaf people throughout history. In fact, because communication was so difficult these people were denied some of the basic human rights. What kinds of aids were available before technology gave us the aids we know today?

Without language we can’t even think let alone communicate and reason. Education, or rather lack of it, was one of the biggest issues for the pre-lingually deafened.

‘I’ve had a cochlea implant. I know what sound is. I know what speech is. So why can’t I hear straight away? And how can I explain this to my family and friends?’ For those of us who’ve gone deaf and had a cochlea implant these are questions we hear all the time.