The Stutterer (2011) | Hacker News Reader

The Stutterer (2011)

slate.com

28 pointsminding5 comments

I've been on Hacker News for several years now, and I'm often surprised about the amount of content on stuttering that ends up on the front page. Being a stutterer myself, I find it nice that the community upvotes such content.

On a separate note, I wonder how many stutterers end up as software engineers or similar technology related work and as a corollary, how many people on Hacker News are stutterers. It would make sense that there would be quite a few; it's a vocation similar to writing, with a large amount of time spent not talking. It's also lucky that software engineering has an outsized impact in this day and age, so stutterers might actually do quite well!

Fortunately I have gotten much better at managing it compared to when I was a child but still, thinking of doing something like teach a class is nearly unthinkable to me. I just don't know how people manage to talk while deeply concentrated in something. I have to think about pacing myself otherwise whoever is in the other end will have trouble understanding anything at all.

That and appearing like I'm stuck thinking about something while in reality the whole answer is already formulated in my mind and I'm just having trouble saying it out-loud. At least I'm decently good at coming up with synonyms on the spot :)

I am also surprised because it feels like stuttering must be less common than the article suggests, or they're using a looser definition than what I think of. I stutter and didn't encounter another person who stutters until I was almost 40, which seems statistically almost impossible if 1% of the population has a stutter.

The author of this piece also seems to have some self-limiting beliefs. Stuttering doesn't need to mean living in fear or a constant state of longing. I hope they've made some progress on this front over the past 12 years.

I'm drawn by media featuring stuttering. One of my favourite novels, for example, is Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, a book about a 13-year-old boy growing up in 80s Britain and who suffers a stutter. It captures wonderfully the silent struggle, the desperate attempts to conceal a condition.

I'm not a stutterer myself, but expressing myself verbally has always been challenging, so I can empathise with at least some of the difficulties those who stutter face.

Being able to speak fluently and easily is precious.

You know stuttering is like sex. It is breath taking, daunting and most importantly you forever remember your first time! (August 12th during math tutoring session about 35 years ago. I was struggling to say the word "multiply" getting stuck in the "mul")

I suffer from a slightly different and less "famous" problem now which may have been caused by my stuttering - Clattering. As a kid in an effort to get past the "chokepoint", I would mumble a bunch of N words before and after to get over it. Most folks would just give up in pain or pity and I felt relieved. Ofcourse that habit stuck around for a long time even after I learnt to manage the stuttering (breathing exercises, toast masters, general confidence building, making fun of myself etc). Unlike stuttering Clattering results in a very general mumblyness even when you are not stuttering and is a lot harder to fix as in your head you sound coherent. But record yourself and you are staring into a lot of demons!

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