I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I remember growing up, reading or hearing somewhere, that some sets of twins have a special, secret way to communicate. Twin speak. The siblings could talk without anyone around them knowing exactly what they were saying.

That kind of intimacy and privacy seemed like a superpower, like invisibility, or being able to fly.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure how I even heard of twin speak. Was it something from a movie or a book I'd read?

Was that concept even real? So I looked it up, and sure enough, it is a thing. The term is

cryptophasia, from the Greek crypto, meaning secret, and phasia, meaning speech.

Nancy Siegel, director of the Twin Studies Center at Cal State Fullerton, writes that,

based on available studies, it is safe to say that about 40% of twin toddlers

engage in some form of twin speak or cryptophagia.

I grew up with two younger sisters, and we were all close in age.

While we didn't share a language no one else understood,

there were plenty of inside jokes and anecdotes between us. Bits we do, and some we still do.

In that sense, maybe every family has a secret language. And when I say family, I mean that broadly

defined, chosen family too, people who are part of your community. In our house, my kids and I have

plenty of private jokes and stories we refer to with a word or phrase,

a kind of shorthand, only we understand.

I think my kids have their own, too, without me, things they talk and joke about, just the two of them.

It's not twin-speak, but that kind of intimacy still seems

like a superpower to me. Poetry can be a kind of secret language, too, a way of saying the

unsayable, a way of articulating experiences or ideas that are hard to wrap our minds around.

Sharing poems with others, the way we share poems on this show,

is a way of inviting other people into an intimate conversation.

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