The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1889-06-22
STUTTERINGONLYAHABIT
A STORY ABOUT ITS PHASES BY
ONE WHO STICKS IN HIS TALK.

Not Practice the Art Il You Know
How.
From the Netc York SUM-
Suffering is more a nuisance than a dis
ease. 1t is more or less great infection to
ones friends, but how much pain or bother
itcauses the sufferer depends more on his
temperament and digestive powers than on
the extent of his suffering. 1t is mental
and not physical malady. A man does
not stutter because there is anything the
matter with his larynx or vocal cords or
lungs or Adams apple or diaphragm or
with any other part of his anatomy which
the physiological picture books tell about.
He suffers because he either never learned
TO talk properly, or because he does not
practice it, if he did learn how. Talking
REQUIRES muscular efforts, just as enuch as
riding does or parting mans
hair or shaving. The difference is that it
reauires the use of another set of muscles,
which are not as we'll known as the muscles
one uses in shaving, and which in most peo-
nile are taught to work well enough in child
hood to suit them and let go at that. A
man who does not know how to shave him
self will make a botch of it. If he is nerv-
GUS the razor cuts will show; if the muscles
of his face and wrist and fingers are not
trained to it, instead of the razor gliding
smoothly over his face, it viii catch every
little while, and every catch means either
rough. uneven shave or a razor cut.
To an extent, it is the same way with slut
terers. A sufferer usually has the same
yocals organs that other people have, and
when he talks his diaphragm and other
things work in the same way as they do in
other people, That is, thew do if he talks
6os - I'll
catch from time to time and either make
his speaking rough and broken, or, if he
catches badly, make gashes in it fs razor
in clumsy hands does on the face That
man shutters simply means that he does
not know how to talk. He may have big
ger lungs and more healthy vocal organs
than a perfectly controlled and accurate
talker, but he does not know how to use
them. The tools he got by inheritance,
but the proper use of them he is unskiIled
at
To most people suffering and stammer-
ing are the same thing. What difference
there is in the meaning is apparent to few
besides the Sufferers and stammerers
themselves, and all of them even are not
agreed about it. The distinction which
perhaps a majority of those who knew
about it by personal experience make, is
that to SHUTTER is to repeat the sound on
which the hesitation occurs. Like the word
which names it, ''stutter," the sufferer us
ualy tut-tut-tut's, when he ought to finish
up with the consonant sound and go on
with the rest of the word. A stammerer
has the opposite fault. Instead of saying
the same thing over several times, he has
trouble to say it once. Instead ofNdoing
the tut-tut-tut, he wonld get to tkas't .4filcn5
stick there with his jaws firmly les. Prices,
air in his lungs rushing out though there
teeth in sufficient volume to c. ISo iS p,or
sentences of an GRAFTON to POI yo,,otations
ering in competition with bras
the effiux of air came from the 1t. II
man trained and skilled in util.101S
However the fault may be, they rea. 9h IL.
it Is the same in both cases.
Suffering is thing which peopfs who do
not stutter do not understand, "a man
who has always talked fiuently and who
learned when he was so young that be has
forgotten about it, viii tell a suffering
friend to ''brace up and talk properly"
The story of Demosthenes and the pebbles
has been poured into the ears of every slut
terer hundreds of times by his friends. 1t is
unlikely that Demosthenes really suffered.
What he probably had was defective utter
ance, and the pebbles tended to counterfeit
that, as man, who could enunciate with
pebbles in his mouth would enunciate more
clearly with them out The trouble with
sufferer is not that he does not enunciate
clearly but that he does not enunciate at
all. The roaring of the sea might have
been good thing for Demosthenes in ac-
customing him to talking to uproarious
crowds, but what good it would do stutter-
er is hard to see, as his trouble is not the not
being able to talk to multitudes, but the not
being able to talk to anybody, not even the
sea. In fact, some Sufferers can talk bet
ter to crowd than to one, and there are
many cases where man cannot talk in
conversation, but can make speech.
The fact that Sufferers can talk some
times and cannot talk at other times shows
that there is nothing inherent in his phys
ical arrangement to prevent his talking, but
that some mental influence or defect is re-
sponsible. Almost every one shutters more
or less. There are few men who do not
hesitate at times or who do not at times
have difficulty IN enunciating the next
word they wish to use. They may not be
conscious of it themselves, because man
who has talked well and easily all his life
usually pays no attention to it. any more
than he does to his lungs when they do
their work properly or to his stomach when
bis digestive organs do not trouble him. A
sufferer notices all these things in other peo-
pie, just as the man who has hay fever is
Interested in the hay fevers of other people,
and notices the symptoms of it's approach,
where a man who never had hay fever
would think nothing of it. Few men talk
perfectly, and few men are dumb. Between
the two come the vast number, though it is
hard to see just where the line can be drawn
between the man who shutters and the man
who does not There are few men who can
not recall some time in their lives
when they knew perfectly well what they
wanted to say, the very words of it, and
still that they did not say it because they
could not. Fear, embarrassment, astonish-
nlent. and other emotions affect a mans
power to speak. In some men it takes much
more emotion than in other men. So it is
with Sufferers. 1t takes less to upset a
sufferer and to prevent him from saying
what he wishes to say than it does to inter-
fere with the enunciation of a man who
has been accustomed to enunciate with
ease
What many people do not know is that
stuttering-the term is used throughout in
the sense of both stammering and stutter-
lug-that suffering is the inability TO say
consonants. Any stutterer can say vowels.
The only thing required to say a vowel is to
send out air through the throat, which is in
certain position according to the vowel
sound which it is intended to produce.
People from different countries and from
different parts of this country do not pro-
nounc9 the same vowel sounds in the same
way. The long "a" of man raised in
New Y ork is different, perceptibly differ
ent, from the long 'sa' of South Carroll
man or a Maine man, and the trained ear
Cln diSfipouish tho diffaranca ha-