h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Interiorised or Covert Stammering – A Personal Account - A87707857
Author: Otto Fisch - In my Joy Division oven gloves - U182089

Right then.... this is still very much a work in progress. I've got ideas for a few more sections, but I also wanted to know what other people would want to know, if that makes sense.

Also.... this entry doesn't meet the old edited guide rules because it's a first person piece and because it's at least partly experience and opinion. I hope this kind of thing might fit into the new edited guide, or whatever it is going to be called. This is a long way off being ready, though..

Hi Otto

Great to read this! I liked the style at it read well.

I guess the first thing to say is that I'm no be-all and end-all for what goes in the Edited Guide. That's down to the Guide Editors, at present we haven't changed any writing guidelines, we're letting things settle down. What follows is my personal opinion:

I enjoyed reading this, I felt it was balanced and informative - I learn a lot from it.

I agree that it needs more - you've written about coping and trying to hide your stammer. I'd like to know if there are other ways of coping, such as a saying to the chair of the meeting'I've got a stammer please don't cut me off'. I get the feeling that you are about to come to that.

You mention more about different circumstances - such as phones - are you going to come onto that? It would be good.


And finally - would it be possible to change the title, it seems very technical - something more approachable would be great.

But well done, and good work.

Hi Otto

Sorry I didn't 'notice' this Entry until Z pushed it in front of me. The bug seems to have removed my auto subscriptions to EGE.

I think your piece starts very well and is both informative and readable. I'd like to see less of your personal anger though at the end, as it brings the whole thing down and ends on a sour note.

Out of interest, my late husband had exactly the same type of blocking stammer - although even I would never have guessed. Shame he's not around to ask how his coping mechanisms worked, but I do know he had quite a few. I know he avoided starting sentences with certain words, and as you say had stock 'run ins'

Also, many aeons ago, I studied language development in young children and one thing I remember was that teaching left handed children to write with their right hand was thought to be a cause of stammering. I have no idea now if this is true or not ( this was, as I say waaaaaay back in time) Teachers now would never dream of doing so, but I do know quite a few of my generation or older who had their left-handedness forcibly removed for writing purposes. The theory went something like - it messes up the dominant pathways and affects speech as a side affect. Whether there was any actual statistical evidence for this is probably lost in time - but the worry that teachers could be causing stammering was the major reason that teachers gave up forcing left-handed children to write with their right hand.

Anyway, I'm subscribed to this piece now.

As Z said, we've not got round to revising the Guidelines just yet, but they are going to be more flexible and inclusive.

I'd like to see this progress into the Guide - thanks for writing it.

Thanks for your comments

As is perhaps (too) obvious, it's a personal piece, so I think I'm more likely to wait to see if the edited guide rules change, rather than change the first person element or too much about the tone. If that means it ends up in the underguide (if some new version of that emerges) or the Post, that's fine by me. I've no real interest in writing an encyclopaedia style entry about this, as the internet already has a decent enough overview on stammering on wiki (which I hadn't read until just now) - though it's confused on a few points, and tends to repeat the myth that the appropriate goal of therapy is for someone to sound as "normal" as possible to the casual listener.

It's nowhere near ready, but I wanted to gather at least some feedback on what people wanted to read on this topic. I think I'm going to split off 'passing for normal' from stuff on what it feels like to have a stammer - the phenomenology. The anger and frustration stuff is going in somewhere - it would be inauthentic to leave it out - though I agree it's not something to end on, and needs to be balanced. I'm not writing a misery memoir.

I'm going to add in something about particular challenges (telephones etc), and some things about ways to react/respond and to communicate with people who stammer.

I agree that the title isn't great, but I was struggling to think of an alternative. I could use either covert or interiorised rather than both, if that would help...

I personally see nothing wrong in this being an opinion piece.

One of the very good reasons for the rule being 'no first person' was that we could turn away rants and political/religious/deluded stuff away very easily at a simple stroke.

I would like to see balanced personal views made into Edited Entries - and this is a case in point - you have a very important story to share. As you say 1 out of every hundred people suffer with this. So that makes a huge audience - plus all of those who have a friend or relation with this difficulty.

I'm thankful that Dr Z and Lanza put me onto this entry. You've got something great going here. I'm looking forward to getting this into the Guide.

I think the first-person's just fine, myself. It isn't as if you were offering uncorroborated testimony as to your best friend's barber's encounter with a psionic toilet (see elsewhere in PR). Your experiences make the narrative real - you're speaking with authority, and you're telling us a lot we didn't know about this situation from the inside. Getting the reader to be 'inside' the situation is Step 1 in getting the reader educated.

Before I offer a couple of suggestions, may I put in my two cents of personal experience? I've got the 'Appalachian speech defect', and my hearing-aid specialist told me that got worse because partially deaf people, er, talk funny. But since I'm living in the American South again, it's less noticeable, since many of us 'talk funny'.

Back when I did radio, I used the fact that nobody could see me to contort my face a lot when I had to say things I found difficult. Like, say, 'asks'. A professor in Germany told me to tell everyone I was from Siegen - 'everybody up there has the same speech defect you do'. (So, yeah, I do it in other languages, too.)

I realise just now (by looking it up) that 'stutter' and 'stammer' are supposed to be synonyms. Where I come from, we say 'stutter' to mean the difficulty in pronouncing the beginnings of words. The k-k-k-katy problem. Stammering we use for people who start the same sentence about three times - a lot of rural Southerners did this when I was growing up. I actually found this pleasing, but then, I'm weird.

My father's cousin had a profound stutter. As often happens, he didn't stutter when he sang, and he had a good voice. All his family and friends enjoyed the record of gospel songs he made.

Speech problems can be used to good effect, as the beloved old-time country music singer Mel Tellis well knew. Because of the way Mel used his stutter, audiences clamoured for his funny stories, as here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aweaoakyK8

Okay, enough about us hillbillies. A couple of suggestions:

1. Think of a title that pulls the reader in, such as 'Wrapping Your Tongue Around the Problem - A Personal View of Stammering'. I'm sure you can think of a better way to do that.

2. The last section needs work - but it really needs to be there, too. The problem isn't that you're pointing out bad behaviour on the part of so-called 'normal' people. The problem is that it isn't focussed yet. You need a hook to shift the attention away from you.

Shift the emphasis in that section to the reader. Put the burden on him. Call it 'How to Cope with Other People's Stammering'. Let them know there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Then give examples. Make mock of what people do/say that is totally wrong. Make *them* feel like the dorks. (Be, er, subtle about this. But not too subtle.)

3. List some famous people who have stuttered.

4. Possibly express how you feel about Porky Pig and other jokes that use speaking handicaps as a punchline?

Well, I'm not sure quite what I've done to deserve such a detailed set of comments for what's really a very vague outline of an article, but I'm very grateful to you all.

I had to google 'Appalachian speech defect'... am I right in thinking that the 'Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel' character in 'The Simpsons' speaks in an exaggerated version of it? Now you mention it, those kind of stereotypical characters do sometimes stutter, but it seems to be part of speaking very slowly... and that kind of thing can happen a lot... a stutter gets hidden because it's disguised and absorbed by wider speech patterns. For example, I can't work out whether Hugh Grant's character in 'Four Weddings' (and, frankly, a lot of his other films) is supposed to have a stammer (using word substitution to frantically fill gaps with words that he can say because he can't say what he wants to say), or is he just vague and indecisive?

The issue of stammering (and Tourettes, and pretty much every other speech impediment you can think of) being apparently fair game for comedy is a really difficult one. On the one hand, it feels a bit like special pleading for me to say that those kind of jokes aren't appropriate, but other 'offensive' and/or harmful comedy where disadvantaged groups are the target is okay. Having said that... 'Holy Flying Circus' (BBC4 comedy-drama about protests against Monty Python's Life of Brian') had a character with Tourettes and one with a stammer, essentially as a cipher to portray the protesters as social misfits and losers. Which was nice of them But I think I can find something to say on this.... though oddly it didn't occur to me that Porky Pig had a stammer until I read it somewhere a few years ago. But then he repeats syllables, whereas I only block, so it sounds very different.

I don't think I'm going to include a list of famous people who stammer, not least because it's about 1% of all famous people, with a greater percentage for actors. It's also not always clear which were childhood stammerers, and which stammered into adulthood. I know celebrities and achievers and role models are important to some people, but I really couldn't care less whether Moses/Churchill/Nye Bevan etc stammered or not - that's just not relevant to me. Perhaps I should say why. I guess I'm going to have to deal with the 'Kings Speech' question too...

The title is a difficult one because I don't want to write an general entry on stammering or even claim that that's what I'm doing, because covert stammering is a particular subset. I have the option of passing for normal, so I don't really know what it's like not to have that option, other than remembering when I was younger. I'll give it some more thought.

Lanza, you mentioned the left-handed issue. I do remember a crayon being taken out of my left hand and put into my right hand, but I think it only happened once. I've also heard the theory about pathways, but not recently, and it doesn't seem to be mentioned. I know of very few left handers who use their cutlery in a genuinely left handed way, so I suppose all left handers have to adapt to a right handed world. But then handedness is a spectrum....

I have a fantastic drunken stutter.

Once when trying to tell a friend that
"people keep commenting on my trousers" i succeeded in telling her
"people keep . . . . c c c c People keep . . . people keep Trousers!'

the trousers in question are rainbow striped tie-dyed corduroy.

My stutter also sometimes appears if I am very sleepy, or ill.

it can be frustrating, but also fun, but i don't have to deal with it every day.

mini

I was dying to know what you thought on the Kings Speech. I expect you get asked it all the time, and it must be hard to talk about, but I'd like to know how accurate a reflection of stammering it really is.

Appalachian speech defect has more to do with our inability to pronounce certain sounds without great effort, such as 'pumpkin', 'asks', etc. In the mountains, you hear 'th'ow me the ball', instead of 'throw'.

I had to look this Simpsons thing up. I wish Mr Groening would stick to Midwestern humour. I believe he may be trying to mock 'rednecks', a catch-all term for rural Southerners. Mountain people find this sort of thing tiresome after awhile.

I found this Youtube on North Carolina Appalachian dialect, slightly different from the Tennessee variety I'm used to, but you can hear real human speech instead of something a voice actor from Minnesota made up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU&feature=related

some impressive beards in that.

Oh and Poke is used in Scotland to mean a bag too!

but for some reason my grat grandfather always called an ice creme cone a pokey hat

my mum lived in south carolina for 4 years and her american accent (when it appears) is similar to those in that clip.

mini

Hey! So that's where 'poke' came from.

That's interesting. So is 'Appalachian speech defect' just a case of certain sounds not existing in the local dialect, and so never being learnt? A bit like a native German speaker will struggle with 'W' sounds in English, and a Chinese speaker with 'R' sounds which don't exist in their own native languages?

I haven't seen the 'King's Speech', and don't intend to, because I think it'll only make me angry. I guess it's a good thing in that it "raises awareness", and certainly it's allowed conversations to take place that wouldn't have happened otherwise, and a lot of press coverage about stammering has been generated that wouldn't otherwise have happened. However, from what I've heard it perpetuates some pernicious myths about the cause of stammering (dysfunctional families, childhood trauma, pushy parents, mental weakness etc). I suspect that it's really just a feel-good. triumph over adversity, quasi-Merchant Ivory, odd couple buddy-movie. But no doubt the world is a better place for it. Funnily enough, apparently someone said, without any irony, that KS could do for stammering what Rain Man did for autism.

I'd also be forced to reflect on the difference in support and help available to, say, the heir to the throne, and say, a shy kid at a London state school in Thatcher's Britain who got precisely duck-all squared. And that way bitterness lies. I'd also end up reflecting on the way that I fear things are heading that way once more for the next generation. But never mind, we're all in it together

Back on topic, I've done a fair bit of work on the entry and I think the structure is about in place. Probably only two sections away from first full draft stage....

I love that section on 'how not to make a fool of yourself'. Well done, sir. People will be grateful.

I agree about avoiding 'feel-good' movies about stuttering. You don't need to mention Derek Jacobi, either.

There's a difference between the speech impediment and the Appalachian dialect. I think the dialect is responsible for the fact that people say 'piller' instead of 'pillow'. (Prejudice against long o's at the ends of words.) So many people saying 'ast' or 'axed' for 'asked' is due to widespread malocculsion. (My dentist hates me.)

Jimmy Carter cannot say 'oil' to save his life. Listen to that nuclear engineer try to SAY 'nuclear'.

This entry's going to be a great addition to the Guide.

This looks very good, and i will look through it, but i suspect i would be more use to you tommorrow, when i've slept

Apart from a bit of tidying up, I think this entry is now pretty much in 'first full draft' form and would be ready for peer review if it conformed with the existing guidelines. I'm a little concerned about the word count - it's perhaps a little on the long side now.

I think I'm just going to leave this here for now and see what happens with the EG.

I think that this is great - and Lanza did say that it might be suitable for the guide as it was, with the first person.

Why don't we wait for Lanza and Dmitri to come back and advise?

I should say that I'm not trying to force the issue in any way. I know that massive amounts of work has been done and is being done in terms of transferring the site, picking up and facilitating the return of old researchers, bug splatting etc, and I'm very, very grateful to everyone involved. I know there have been lots of conversations about the future of the Edited Guide, and I'd imagine that there are more to come. I'm happy to wait for the outcome of those, which might not be particularly high on the current priority list. Even if that takes some time, that's fine by me.

I wrote this partly because the survival and thrival (new word) of h2g2 was a spur to start writing again, and partly because it's a good thing for me to do. I would never have dreamed of writing anything like this a couple of years back. Even six months ago I was planning on setting up a new account (probably in the name of 'Guy Dentry') to write and submit it from....

I haven't read this yet, so I can't comment on the content, but I've checked the word count. At about 4,600 words, it's slightly longer than we normally recommend, but shouldn't be a problem. Just don't add any huge chunks to it, please.

The content is very good, and in my opinion justifies a place in the Edited Guide as a personal account (so keep this phrase in the title).

I'd drop the first section header. We don't usually need them, and you don't actually explain what a covert stammer is until a later section anyway.

Icy