G-G-G-G-G-Granville! (#7): I’ve Said it Once and I’ll Say it Again

It was pointed out – by Gorilla Bananas, no less – that stammerers are not so much getting stuck on words but emphasising them. It’s true. And as well as repeating (that’s emphasising) sounds, repeating whole words is also a habit stammerers get into: they’re so used to restarting the run-up they often don’t realise they’ve already taken off. (This also, up to a point, makes them fantastic lovers... another story). In fact, Scientists believe that repetition is actually the reason for stammering in the first place: evolution has hard-wired into our brains the knowledge of the fundamental truths of the universe and the only way of making people understand these are by constantly repeating them, and the only way of doing this without seeming like pedantic bores is by having a speech impediment. Clever or what that Darwin, eh? These scientists go on to say that we emphasisers are ipso facto the chosen conduits of the eternal verities, and that these are the chosen ones:

Tony Hancock: “That’s a good ‘un, that’s a good ‘un!” Hancock often repeated his best lines. Did comedy dieties Galton & Simpson script them like that or was The Lad ‘Imself fulfilling a higher destiny?

Tony Blair: “Education education education”. Now that sounds an eternal truth if ever there was one. And heck, we chose him; you can’t much more chosen than that.

Policemen: “‘Allo ‘allo ‘allo”. The police get a bad press but they’ve got a difficult job imposing their (foreordained) authority. Especially when stammering. I suppose having a truncheon makes it easier.

MacBeth: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... Out, out, brief candle!... (etc)”. The Downside. Macca knows too much, and it’s not made him a happy bunny.

Jimmy Saville: “Now then now then now then…. urghh-ughh-ughh!” Strewth. Saville’s clearly a conduit of something. Beats me what though.

Bill Withers: “I know, I know, I know I know, I know I know I know”. Bill’s getting exciting and perhaps giving away too much here. We need to keep our mystery, mate.

James Brown: “Vienna”. Stammering Brother No. 1 has already been mentioned on this blog, and with his repeated and seemingly irrelevant intoning of the word “Vienna” was clearly trying to tell us something about pre-WWI diplomacy. Too late.

The Byrds: “Turn Turn Turn”. Where were we supposed to turn to? That's for them to know and you to find out.

The Beatles: “Yeah Yeah yeah”. Ok, ok, it's piss-easy to pick on repetitions in pop songs and I promise this'll be the last, but it shows you’ll never go bust by underestimating the public's need for banality.

Bruce Forsyth: “Good game good game”. Brucie, evolution’s greatest achievement so far, also responsible for the near-palindromic “Nice to see you to see you nice”.

G-G-G-G-G-Granville! (#4) The World's Top Stammerers

Disclaimer: Gadjo Dilo in no way supports bullying, which is shite, and anyway he now has several years of martial arts training under his belt so come over here - yeah you, <name deleted> - and try your luck if you disagree :-)

As promised, and with great pride, I hereby present the cream of the world’s stammerers. Rather than categorise them by profession I’ve used a simple tripartite taxonomy based on psychological profiling which I call “Playground Kicking Classification”. This simple metric also has everyday application: when you come across a stammerer, enact this scenario in your imagination and you’ll quickly understand what sort of stammerer it is and how it should be treated. (I myself largely managed to avoid this nonsense in the school playground by floating around like some ethereal golden-haired sprite too beautiful to be touched by human hand – I still don’t understand how I got away with it.) Some of the following may actually be ex-stammerers, but this only goes to show how effective a good kicking can be.

FREAKS
Kickable, regardless of what they might have “achieved”:

Rowan Atkinson: If kicked will do the funny face. Now probably a multi-millionaire though.
Yukio Mishima: Gay Japanese poet and fascistic ritual suicidalist - asking for it.
Marc Almond: We suspect he made his stammer up to justify his vaunted victimhood status.
Lewis Carroll: Simply a freak. Avoid.
Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad (Indian communist leader): Looks more like a Swot (see below) but you’d always make him say his name in full and then throw his duffel bag over the fence.

COOL PEOPLE
Can stammerers be cool?? Surprisingly, yes, though it may not be obvious at first. By constantly compensating for their deficiency they can become extraordinary gifted at something else. If you’re smart you’ll think before you kick:

Winston Churchill: The ultimate over-compensating stammerer. Respect.
Tiger Woods: All black sportsmen are cool, even if they play golf (though this pushes it a bit, admittedly).
Marilyn Monroe: Sex kitten. Enough said.
James Earl Jones: Super-cool - turned his stammer into the world’s most mellifluous voice.
Joe Biden: An asthmatic, a dunce and a stammerer when young, but you'll soon be mighty glad that you didn’t nick his dinner money.

SWOTS
The “halfway-house” where kicking’s concerned. Many stammerers spend a lot of time in libraries and other places where they try to avoid embarrassing themselves. Surprisingly, it can be worth giving these types the time of day: by pretending to be their friends you can get to copy their homework. Kick, but only as an incentive:

Bruce Willis: “Cool Person”, surely? No. Swot. Becoming a famous actor with a stammer and no talent, he must be a grafter.
Ed Balls: Maths homework... possibly. But which came first, the stammer or the cruel nicknames?
Isaac Newton: He also wore a girl’s wig so even looks like a freak, but his homework’s still worth borrowing.
Charles Darwin: A useful science bod on your homework team, though you'd have to do the monkey dance every time you met him.
Aristotle: Unusual double Cockney rhyming slang for “arse” (via “bottle and glass”), but he’s one of the swots that other swots most often copy from, so knowing him can save you a trip or two to the library.

This list of high-achieving stammerers seems endless, though actually it ends here. T-t-ta-ta for now!

G-G-G-G-G-Granville! (#3): Cunning Linguists

In previous posts I’ve covered how stammering made a me a dancer and a fan of popular music. In later ones I’ll tell you how it gave me an access-all-areas pass to the spirit world and the abilities to talk with animals and to pass undetected through the realms of the mad. A list of high-achieving stammerers is also planned, as is a generous offer to share a little of our coveted victimhood status with you. But now as promised, and laying all false modesty aside, I’m going to explain how stammering made me a linguist. Casual observers may think this strange: “Why’s he want to study languages? It’s not like he’s gonna be able to speak them!” Yeah, right. Well, I’ll discuss another time the perfectly possible business of grappling with a foreign tongue; but first I’m going to explain the stammerer’s special relationship with the structural concepts that underlie human language. (This might be considered appropriate recompense for the tax-payers money spent training me as a computational linguist, though, as I shall explain, I didn’t really need any training, so it was a waste of your money, but thanks anyway). Like stammering, linguistics - in any sense that is worthy of the name - is a long run rather than a 100 metre dash. Of course as a stammerer you’ll start at the back of the linguistic pack, less able to talk to the nice barmaid than the barfly who’s already got the previous 3 up the duff, but it ain’t over till it’s over. If you hang in there you’ll see there are advantages; oh yes; advantages that like a fine port wine you can only appreciate over time; advantages that are specifically and paradoxically linguistic in origin. I relate them here to provide, I hope, a little encouragement for any young stammerer who’s yet to espy the prize.

The stammerer’s journey on the Road to Wellville is, like that of the constipation sufferer, an inner journey. But while the much-awaited petite mort of expelling something meaningful can be just as exulting, here the similarity ceases; for while the former has no choice over which shit to spit the latter has the golden treasury of all possible sounds available from the human vocal organs! Yes, you learn to make word substitutions - English is particularly rich with such alternatives. Get stuck on your haitches? you say “pensione” instead of “hhhhhhotel”; trouble with voiced alveolar plosives? it’s “hound” instead of “d-d-dog”; “seafood” instead of “fffffish”, “old lady” instead of “mmmmummy dearest”; (but of course it’s “g-g-get it on” not “make love” if you think the the sympathy factor kicks in). You see, you’ve already learned to use twice as many words and phrases as your average non-afluent! And there’s more. Some words can’t so easily be ignored, like names* and pronouns. But here’s where it gets really clever: it’s easier if you don’t have difficult sounds at the start of a sentence. You therefore learn to switch the grammar around before you speak. You’ll learn not to say “Yyyyyou are getting on my tits!!” but, “The one who’s getting on my tits is yyou!! or even better “There’s one who’s getting on my tits, ‘tis thee!! See, it’s the perfect training for a poet, and after a while these linguistic gymnastics come as naturally as breathing (more so, in a stammerer’s case). Bingo, you’re the next Percy B-B-F*****g Shelley - and then the crumpet’s for free. (Ding dong!) And finally, I’ve only now realised that I’ve got into the habit of using the variant “stammering” rather than the more widely used “stuttering” simply because it’s easier to say. B-cheerio!!!


* This is obviously how epithets started back in the days of oral tradition: Homer can’t say his Zs so Zeus is “He who Releases Rain”. Kennings too: an Icelandic scald can’t say his Ss so it’s a “wound-hoe” not a “sword”. And you can make up entirely new names - Lewis Carroll was a stammerer.