John Cleese’s feigned patience with Michael Palin’s imp-p-pediment in A fish called Wanda reminds me that it’s hard for people to know how to react to a stammerer.

Stammering is stressful for both sufferers and their audience, meriting understanding and ongoing research; but alleviating all-round embarrassment, humour can help defuse tension. The experts’ advice to friends is not to try and supply the word for the stammerer, but sometimes when people can’t resist, I may find they’ve suggested a more interesting word than the trite predictable one that I’m actually wrestling with. So I go with it, following their word up with a revised phrase that seems to work—until I meet my next block; when they supply another promising word, I keep going with a further logical sequence… Thus I become a kind of puppet, almost a psychiatrist, for my interlocutor’s free-floating word associations.

Here’s another fun party game to while away those longueurs while I’m stuck on a knotty c-c-consonant. I arrange in advance with my friends that they should choose a special subject—French baroque composers, feminist thinkers 1900–1960, Premier League football teams, take your pick. * This works best in a group, where everyone has their own subject. When I’m floundering on a difficult w-w-word, if they can think of one within their subject before I get my word out, then they win a p-p-point. Thus:

When I’m floundering on a difficult w-w-
West Ham!
if they can think of one within their subject before I get my word out, then they win a p-p-
Pankhurst!

Indeed, if you see potential in an initial consonant on which you don’t necessarily feel an impending block, you can even manufacture one—experimenting with deliberate stammering is one tool that therapists use to help stammerers experience control over their voice. Since we spend our whole lives desperately trying to avoid stammering, to allow ourselves to do so (and then modify it) can come as an amazing relief—though it’s not a panacea.

Like my fantasy Daoist ritual game, hours of fun for all the family. For more on humour and stammering, see here.

* This is somewhat different from the old party games of “Name three 19th-century composers who didn’t die of syphilis” and “Name three American composers who weren’t pupils of Nadia Boulanger“.