Getting accused of sarcasm??

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Is it just me, or have my fellow Aspies been wrongfully accused of being sarcastic??

Yeah, I know, it's kind of ironic comment- because we're more likely to be on the receiving end of sarcasm (and often not know it)

But, you can sort of see how such an accusation might arise against us -just think of these communications mishaps that frequently occur to us Aspies because of our inherent lack of Theory of Mind, and pragmatics:

"Oh! I'm sorry, you didn't explicitly tell me that you meant <insert real meaning>"
"Oh! I'm sorry, I had no idea that you really meant Y, I thought you meant X (literal meaning...)"
"Well, you could have just told me that..."
"Oh! I had no idea, that was not intuitively obvious to me."

So clearly, an uninformed NT might assume that we're being perverse, sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

...then people react badly, or even worst, they let it simmer and then react in a "funny" way or frosty way towards you later on, and in true Aspie fashion we don't put two and two together and link their behaviour with acrimony towards us and our perceived sarcasm.

On two occasions though, in my early 20s, I was actually assaulted due to such a reaction. One guy insisted that I was acting that way on purpose and (this was before my diagnosis) I completely bewildered insisted otherwise, which resulted in the assault.

I suppose it stands to reason in a way, because there is a larger percentage of people in the general population who have abusive and deliberately perverse traits rather than aspie traits. SO naturally people assume malevolent intent first.

But, NTs, looking at "the bigger picture" as they are wont to do, will likely see other traits like your clumsy coordination, deer-in-the-headlights look, etc, and conclude that you really are "clueless" and not sarcastic.

On the odd occasion, I have been intentionally sarcastic with people, usually when I was sick and tired of their BS or badgering or what have you, thinking it might slip by but nope, they detected it and called me on it. This happened with my former stepmother a lot, who was really nasty and abusive, and even after years of knowing me she still accused me of being sarcastic when I wasn't - obviously she wasn't as emotionally attuned as she claimed to be. Yet, It seems I can ill afford to be intentionally sarcastic, when I tend to get accused of sarcasm unintentionally

These above quotes do come across sarcastic to me because the speaker sounds like he/she is accusing the other person of purposefully miscommunicating, being stupid, or being impolite.

I have a personal rule I follow to never say out loud what I *think* a person is saying or meaning until I'm pretty sure I understand it. Instead, if I'm not sure I heard/understood clearly, I politely ask the other person to please repeat what was said or rephrase it. I might say, "I'm sorry. I don't understand what you said/mean." It might make me look really dumb, especially if I have to ask more than once, but I'm usually not going to come across as sarcastic or impolite. It is better to "take the blame" for communication problems by assuming *I* am the one that heard wrong than to accuse the other of speaking wrong. Even if you are sure that *I* heard right, for the sake of relationships, I will assume I didn't and ask for clarification. Then, if I have to check if I understand right, I will say, "Do you mean <such-and-such>?" And if the answer is "yes", then I will say, "Thanks. I wasn't sure before", or something along those lines.

The above quotes sound more like "I'm sorry you screwed up this communication."

It also reduces embarrassment when I actually do hear wrongly. So many times, my family members will say out loud something they thought someone else said and it is TOTALLY WRONG. For example, one time, my husband and my daughter were driving in the car and she asked, "Is this the shortest way?" And my husband responded, "The SHREDDER SPRAY? What?" NO, of course NOT the "shredder spray!" Why on earth would my daughter randomly say that? In context, my husband should have assumed that no one would say such a ridiculous thing. By saying it out loud, he communicated that my daughter is just that ridiculous and that there's no way he could have misheard.

This is just one example of how people will say out loud what they think someone else said. I have seen *many* people do this. I have told many people about my rule, family and friends alike. I would just rather assume that I misheard or misunderstood, and ask again than to reveal the ridiculousness that first came into my mind.

LOL....that happens to me all the time. My wife might seem to say something along the lines of "shredder spray," when she's actually say "shorter way"--and I'll hear what is said as "shredder spray," and react to it as if she said "shredder spray." Dumb mistake on my part; my wife pounces on me in these situations.

This is partially because she has an accent which I sometimes comprehend imperfectly; additionally, she sometimes uses expressions from her country which I had never heard before--like "mincemeat" for "chopped meat"--and she expects me to know that expression intuitively. Before I met my wife, the only time I ever heard the term "mincemeat" was when Jinx the Cat, in the Hanna Barbera cartoon, would exclaim: "I'll make mincemeat out of that mouse!"

Misunderstandings also occur because my wife is from a culture which (for self-preservation reasons under a colonialist regime up until 1962) which is strong on irony and sarcasm--two things which are not exactly my specialty.

Happens to me all the time. People can't believe that some things I say I'm serious about.

Once people start misunderstanding me, everything I say is interpreted wrongly and negatively. My innocent well-intended comments are taken as sarcasm. They try to read some negative intention in my comments. I realize by now those people are actually projecting their own negative mentality onto me. So it's a good indicator of how someone's mind works. It's best to keep away from people that see sarcasm where there is none.

More of tone.

I've been accused of it when I was younger.

I have all the time, though I usually am sarcastic.