The speech impediment is believed to effect 3% of the population and Daniel Byron writes about the frustration it often involves
“HI my name is D-d-d-aniel…” someone would retort “Ha! You’ve forgotten your name?” Which is all too common. The first few times I took offence, but now it’s not even original nor an attempt at patter.
Anyway, I (like 80 million people in the world, the commonly used number) have a stammer. I’ve always had it, ever since I can remember at least. It’s something that haunts me, not feeling in control – not being able to order at a restaurant coherently or a pint at a pub. It’s something that affects my confidence.
I am lucky as people say they don’t notice it, but that’s because I swap words out when I know a block is coming. Some people on the internet call it “covert stammering”, where you insert filler words, such as “emmm”, or swap words about before blocking on them. There are some situations in which you can’t swap the words about, say you’re in a restaurant and you really want the Spaghetti Bolognese, but you can’t get the words out so you settle for something easier to say like a burger. It can make you feel like a fool and like a child.
People that know me, know I love a pint of Guinness, one of the reasons I tend to only drink the stout is because Guinness is a nice easy word to say. And on the off chance I did stutter, I could easily switch it up and ask for a “pint of plain” or “black” or “stout” so many variations.
I am thankful when people say they didn’t know, it means it’s working. But it does frustrate me not necessarily that I want people to know – I don’t want pity, it’s just when I start to stammer it’s usually quite bad and people would laugh about it.
The late Joseph Sheehan described stammering as being “like an iceberg,” so the part above the surface, what people see and hear, is really the smaller part. By far the larger is the part underneath the shame, the fear, the guilt, all those other feelings that we have when we try to speak a simple sentence and can’t.
My fear of stuttering can easily become worse than the stuttering itself. The feeling of dread I have about anything which involves speaking is clouded by the possibility of stuttering. A way to combat this could be to embrace the stutter and just keep on going in a way it can be authentic, if it works for the president of America it can work for me too. I guess?
But even he gets bullied and mocked for it, Donald Trump will stoop as low to mocks someone’s disability, which he has started to do since Biden’s well received State of the Union address. Trump despite joking about a reporters disability in 2015 by intimating the upper-body movements of the journalist. He always exercised some restraint around stuttering, perhaps because Republicans stutter too, including his friend Herschel Walker who has a place on Stuttering Foundation’s website alongside the incumbent president.
Trump did it more subtly in the last campaign, with his team clipping up Biden’s verbal mishaps. When Biden mixes up names, or dates, it’s not because of his stutter it’s just him making a mistake.
Trump may be among the most famous and powerful people in modern history, but he remains a small-minded bully.
When you’re a covert stammerer, reading a book out loud is extremely challenging – something we had to do at school of course – or now at university having to read an autocue. It doesn’t matter how familiar with the script I am, there will always be one word – ad-libbing is far much easier. But that isn’t always practically done.
Having the speech impediment is often seen as having a low intelligence – perhaps because it is often used in comedies to show an idiotic character off – however, it is just not a true assumption. Some of our best speakers, actors, writers and poets have a stammer.
When I spoke with Jane Powell, CEO of Stamma UK, last year about the perceptions of those that stutter, she said: “Research shows that stammering is neurologically based. This means that the way speech is produced in the brain is different for people who stammer. Stammering isn’t an indicator of personality type or intellect, and it doesn’t mean we’re nervous. It’s simply how some of us talk.”