Loss For Words
David Mitchell, on Stammering: They vary from stammerer to stammerer, but we all collect a box of tricks. I subdivide mine into technical fixes and attitudinal stances. Blunt technical fixes would include the “Punch”: where I attack a word to force it out, and the “Foot Tap,” which works like a musician’s a-1,2,3,4, though only when I’m standing, hence my fondness for lecterns. I often use the Long Pause and the Long “Erm…” where I “assemble” a word under the cover of searching for it. There’s the “Autocue Substitute,” where I scan my current sentence for trouble and change vocabulary and grammar to avoid it, without (ideally) my listener noticing. This doesn’t work when I’m doing a reading (though occasionally I’ll substitute a word in one of my own books on the hoof), but it was excellent training for a future novelist. By the age of 15 I was a zit-spattered thesaurus of synonyms and an expert on lexical registers. At my rural comprehensive, substituting the word “pointless” with “futile” would get you beaten up for being a snob because the register’s too high—it’s a teacher’s word—so I’d deploy “useless.” Another crafty technique is “Vowel Vaseline,” where I smear a tricky consonant with its preceding vowel. For example, I fumble with the “s” of “salad,” but not with the word “assalad,” so when I’m ordering in restaurants I say, “I’ll have assalad, please.” If these technical fixes tackle the problem once it’s begun, “attitudinal stances” seek to dampen the emotions that trigger my stammer in the first place. Most helpful has been a sort of militant indifference to how my audience might perceive me. Nothing fans a stammer’s flames like the fear that your listener is thinking “Jeez, what is wrong with this spasm-faced, eyeball-popping strangulated guy?” But if I persuade myself that this taxing sentence will take as long as it bloody well takes and if you, dear listener, are embarrassed then that’s your problem, I tend not to stammer. This explains how we can speak without trouble to animals and to ourselves: our fluency isn’t being assessed. This is also why it’s helpful for non-stammerers to maintain steady eye contact, and to send vibes that convey, “No hurry, we’ve got all the time in the world.” (While we’re on the subject, please don’t finish off our sentences: it makes us feel like doomed contenders in a hellish, eternal game of Countdown.)
