Though the tendency to tic is innate in Tourette's, the particular form of tics often has a personal or historical origin. Thus a name, a sound, a visual image, a gesture, perhaps seen years before and forgotten, may first be unconsciously echoed or imitated and then preserved in the stereotypic form of a tic. Such tics are like hieroglyphic, petrified residues of the past and may indeed, with the passage of time, become so hieroglyphic, so abbreviated, as to become unintelligible {as 'God be with you' was condensed, collapsed, after centuries, to the phonetically similar but meaningless 'goodbye'}.
( Oliver Sacks )
[ An Anthropologist on Mars: ]
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