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From: Paul Brocklehurst
Date: 19 Oct 2006
Time: 16:14:08 -0500
Remote Name: 80.3.128.8
Hi Peter, I enjoyed reading your stimulating article. It brought up in me some memories of the days when I went through a phase of being very much interested in zen. One of its lasting influences on me was to instil a degree of caution in relation to any form of value judgment, whether positive or negative. Thus I guess I feel that, whether one talks about stuttering badly or stuttering well, either way one is being, in a way, judgmental. So I wonder if, paradoxically, to the extent that we try to emphasise the one, there is not a danger that the other also becomes inadvertently emphasized by our purposeful avoidance of it. Your second suggestion… of avoiding low-meaning and vague terms, and using descriptive language instead sounds, dare I say, more “positive”?!.... One final comment, about the descriptive language we use to describe ourselves in relation to stuttering. I recently conducted a survey asking stutterers/pws what terms they themselves thought described them most accurately. The term they considered most accurate was “I am a person who has a stutter”. The term “I am a person who sometimes stutters” came next; and “I am a person who stutters” came third. After reading your article I was thinking that perhaps the term “I have a stutter” would be particularly appropriate for people like the woman you cite in your example… who rarely stuttered, yet was relatively severely affected by the condition. Perhaps it would be a step forward to start using “stutter” as a noun, rather than as a verb? What are your thoughts on this?