“No more!" shouted Marjorie Shiatsu. "I ain't gonna take it no more!"

Shiatsu, 69, born Marjorie Hunt, an ex-steel worker from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recently returned from a two-decade-long assignment as a cafeteria worker in a Japanese steel mill. She had, for the last 41 years, been employed by the Mitsubishi Corporation Metals Group in Nagoya, Japan.

The recent widow of a Japanese forensic taxidermist, she prefers to be called an "ironworker." "It sounds tougher," she explained. "Steelworker sounds too corporate."

Shiatsu apologized for her halting English as we sipped green tea at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead, Georgia. "They say it's like riding a bu-buh-bicycle... speaking a language, that is. But I guess you can forget how to ride a buh-buh-bicycle too. Eh?"

It was difficult for me to hear any flaws in her English other than her tendency to stutter when saying the word "bicycle." Then there was the phrase, "I ain 't gonna take it no more." Other than that, she seemed to give no clue that she hadn't lived in the United States for 41 years, or that she hadn't uttered a word of English during the same amount of time.

She had one other speech quirk. She would say any-who instead of anyhow... possibly a relic of a Typo Inversion Trauma incident from childhood.

Typo-Inversion Trauma Syndrome, or TITS as it's referred to by psychologists, is a rare but not unheard of phonological disorder that, curiously, affects Americans, but rarely other nationalities. China, Japan and Korea, for example, have virtually no occurrences of TITS. The reason, it's assumed, is that the languages mentioned tend to be image or symbol oriented rather than text-based.

A child with TITS will often transpose letters of common words if they've experienced trauma during the act of reading. In this case, reading the word "how" while experiencing trauma can transpose the word into the new form, "who," creating the hybrid compound word, "anywho." Statistical evidence shows that more females exhibit signs of TITS than males.

Shiatsu attributes her TITS to an incident when her brother walked in on her while she was reading in the bathroom. "I was traumatized. Now I can't talk right," she told me. That trauma, she said, played a major part in her decision to move to Japan.

"I left this country in 1964," she told me. "Johnson was President. Kennedy was dead. I said to myself, 'I ain't gonna take it no more.' Between my psychological condition and the state of the world... Vietnam... I'd had enough. I'd been on a trip to Japan when I met Ken, my husband. He was demonstrating his craft at a seminar in a hotel in Kyoto. I fell in love instantly. He was a master. Anyone who could do what he did... with such love."

"Ken died last year," Shiatsu told me as she dabbed a tear from her cheek. He was my only real friend. Of course I had my co-workers, but without Ken, I was just an outsider. They were just being polite. I decided to come back and reconnect with family. I felt that it was time to forgive my brother for the trauma he'd inflicted on me as a child."

"When I came back, I saw the United States in even more chaos than when I'd left. I said, 'I've got to do something. But what?' That's when I decided that the best way for me to set an example for the people around me... to be a role model... was to do something drastic. I decided I was going to stop using my turn signals. I think this country's in for a big shake-up."

I asked her how not using turn signals would shake the country up. "We're not sheep," she told me. "I personally won't be bullied by the government.. by that President 'What's-his-name.' I'm livid. They can throw me in jail if they want, but it'll just prove my point."

I asked her what the point was. "War. Peace. The Economy. Immorality. Feigned morality by leaderhip that thinks that saying you're moral is the same as acting morally. That's the point," she shouted. I nodded in acknowledgement, hoping that nodding would satisfy her enough for her to stop spitting pieces of crackers on me when she spoke. A crowd was gathering.

"It's already catching on," she spat again. "In California, hardly anyone uses turn signals. They get it ! Most people don't get it, but they do! I get it! Maybe someday, you'll get it! You'll see! Things are going to change in a way that's more dramatic than you could ever imagine!" She slammed back the remainder of green tea from her cup, clanked the empty cup on its saucer, then gently wiped her lower lip with the back of her hand.

For a moment, I thought that perhaps I should try to diffuse the situation. I hollered, "CUT !" My ploy worked. The other customers thought we were shooting a movie, albeit without any visible cameras. A passer-by applauded. Another asked her for her autograph.

"What next?" I asked her as she handed the pen and napkin back to the autograph seeker. "I'm going to work on a cure for TITS," she said. "No one should have to live through what I've lived through."