Knotted Tongues by Benson Bobrick

Author:Benson Bobrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1995-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A few days after I arrived, Dr. Travis asked me to come with him to one of his classes. He explained that he wanted the students to observe my speech. I sat in a chair beside his desk at the front of the room. There were thirty or forty students looking at me. Dr. Travis told them who I was and that I was from a small town in Kansas and then he handed me a book and asked me to read aloud to the students. I read for five minutes—and got out four words.

With utter dedication, Johnson set out to reestablish what he presumed to be his lost left-handedness and the hemispheric dominance to which it belonged. But “ ten years and countless bruises later,” he wrote, “having become a threat to my own thumbs, I placed in storage my many ingenious braces and mittens… put away my left-handed scissors, and with my right hand wrote ‘Finis’ to the experiment, still stuttering splendidly.”

With similar commitment, Van Riper had had electrodes planted into the muscles of his face, tied up his right arm in a sling, wrote vertically, panted, and so on, but was just as unsuccessful in this phase of his quest.

Meanwhile, both had also been following Bryngelson’s counsel to stutter deliberately, and over time each came up with new modification techniques—Van Riper with the “slide,” and Johnson with the “bounce.” The slide involved prolonging the initial sound of a syllable; the bounce, its voluntary repetition, in a relaxed and easy way.

Not long ago, at the age of eighty-five, Van Riper recalled the circumstances under which his idea was born:

[It] came to me while hitch-hiking my way home from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where I had spent a month as the hired man on a farm, pretending to be a deaf mute because my stuttering was so severe and grotesque I could not get any other employment. I had hoped thereby to be able to live without talking, but after a month I couldn’t bear it any longer and left to return to a home where I felt I would not be welcome.

After walking several miles I sat under a tree to rest near a field where a man was plowing. Soon an old man in a Model-T Ford pulled up beside me and he got out to talk with the farmer. I noticed that he had an odd way of speaking with many little hesitations but I didn’t think it was stuttering. When they finished their conversation, I accosted him with the thumb gesture for hitch-hiking and he told me to get in the car. Then of course came the inevitable question: “What’s your name, son, and where are you going?” Oh, how I stuttered when I tried to tell him with gasping, facial contortions and body jerks!

The old man then explained to him that he had been a stutterer all his life, and over time had learned to stop fighting it, and instead just “let the words leak out.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.