Terry Prone: Hold your tongue and give those with a stutter a chance to catch up
Is Joe It He That Stammerer President A When A Managed So Delivering Fine Us Mostly Fluency Has Speech, ‘cured’ Is Biden He’s His
Furthermore, don’t make any of the gestures or facial expressions that indicate life is short and you’d like them to stop pointlessly consuming some of your supply. On the other hand, don’t look sympathetic, either.
Just stand still with an open face and wait. That’s not too much to ask, is it? It may take a few minutes. Let’s say it even, on a bad day, might take five whole minutes. The fact is that most of us could drum up that amount of time to respond properly to a stutterer — except that we don’t.
Instead, when they get blocked on a word, we supply it, thereby, to use the currently fashionable term, robbing them of agency over their own communication. Or we supply the item they’re having difficulty identifying, silently handing over the document or product we know they’re looking for. Or we nod repeatedly like one of those bobblehead figures on the dashboard of a car. Or do moanies like a bad radio presenter: “Mmm, mmm.”
The worst among us go a step further and tell the stutterer to relax. Telling anybody to relax at any time is offensive but giving a stutterer that instruction is one degree worse. It assumes you know the cause of their dysfluency. Wrong, you don’t. It assumes they don’t know the cause of their dysfluency. Wrong, they really do. It assumes the right to instruct them. (Wrong, you’re equal except they have a disability.) It assumes they are at fault and, as a result, are inferior to you in some way. (Wrong — this is luck of the draw stuff. You got lucky, they didn’t.)
The godawful life of many stutterers is caused by the empathy of others and by the severe lack of empathy of others.
Few things evoke self-protective behaviour on the part of a non-stutterer like a stutterer right in front of them, unable to get past a particular consonant. While non-stutterers may convince themselves that an intervention is done out of kindness to the stutterer, it’s actually done out of kindness to themselves: Let’s get this agonising non-communication over with and deal with the next person who hopefully won’t have this problem.
Joe Biden is a man with a “cured” stutter. He has managed his communication so that when he’s delivering a speech, his fluency is mostly fine.
That said, one school of thought holds that the verbal digressions, the sudden diversions into content cul-de-sacs which so often cause him problems, may be caused, not by old age but by the stutterer’s capacity to view an oncoming sentence, identify a potential block within that sentence, and seek to steer away from it.
That’s one of the special skills many with a stammer develop: The ability to think on two streams at once, constantly seeking to avoid problem words.
The one thing that’s certain is that there’s never been a Stutter Positivity Movement. Nobody has ever, to my knowledge, claimed to be proud of the stoppages in their speech. Millions of parents of children with stammers have spent a fortune on seeking out cures for them, whether those cures are psychological or physical. The physical ones include singing into a sentence, this based on the observation that nobody stammers when they sing.
I watched the wonderful late theatrical designer Bronwen Casson singing a capella at my 21st birthday, marvelling at the flawless articulation and soaring sweet soprano voice.
After the third verse and before the final one came a pause.
For dramatic impact, we guessed. Until Bronwen said into the microphone “I’ve f-f-f-f-f-f-f-forgotten the next f-f-f-f-f-fucking v-v-v-v-verse.”
This won her a laugh and the cover of a round of applause although my mother always suspected her of deliberately getting more value from the F-word than any previous user.
Elvis Presley, Noel Gallagher, and Carly Simon are among the many singers who tended to stutter in the spoken word, yet had no problem when the words being used were carried by music.
Oddly, many actors, too, stutter, offstage, but the rule about singing seems to in some way extend to them: Once in role, once working within a script, stuttering seems to keep away.
Witness the success of performers like Marilyn Monroe, Harvey Keitel, Nicole Kidman, Jimmy Stewart, and Julia Roberts, all of whom suffered from this issue.
Emily Blunt, herself a stammerer, pushes parents towards involving their children in drama, because, for her, it provided a “miraculous” advance.
Two former government ministers I know had “cured” stutters.
The cures were good but not perfect.
One of them developed the habit of looking away from people when talking to them and of speaking in a driven continuum so that radio and TV presenters generated the fantasy of hitting him with a 2X4 to create a gap within which to insert a question.
Another developed an unusual verbal pattern whereby he talked in a series of speedy blurts, rather than sentences or paragraphs.
He would also grasp you firmly by the forearm and sort-of knead you in time to his utterances, although it was pointed out to me, after one such episode, that he tended to do this kneading thing with more enthusiasm when a female forearm was on offer than when it was male.
John Hendrickson hasn’t, up to now, been counted in lists of famous people with a stutter, although the publication of his book on the subject, (Vintage Books, 2023) will change that.
Once Hendrickson’s mother spotted how his stutter was isolating him, she sought out cures. None worked. Each reinforced his misery. Stuttering provoked other kids — including his older brother — into being horrible to him while evoking impatience and avoidance on the part of adults.
Reading his account of his hampered life is to realise that there’s no upside to a stammer. It gets in the way of every social interaction. And only since the turn of the millennium has it been understood as an aspect of neurodivergence.
But even that is no great advantage and here’s why: A diagnosis of ADHD or autism is often welcomed by the individual as an explanation of their uniqueness.
In contrast, from childhood, stutterers are already diagnosed and most find no comfort in knowing what ails them.