From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Stammering is different than stuttering. Stutterers have trouble with the letters, while stammerers trip over entire parts of a sentence. We stammerers generally think of ourselves as very bright.
No one knows for sure if you can inherit a stammer, and so I worry that my baby might. It's why I want to work on my speech before he arrives. I don't want him to hear me stammer.
I am not stroppy at all.
Before all this happened, I always used to see my stammer as being a negative, all my life, but then when I went on 'Pop Idol,' and the first time I saw it on television, it was really, really bad, but also it made me stand out; it made people remember me. So for the first time in my life, it worked to my advantage.
Living with a stammer is difficult. It's a daily uphill struggle with emotional baggage weighing you down. You can't be the person you want to be.
I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare.
Breathing is fundamental to speech. A stammer is caused by erratic airflow, so if you have a smooth airflow, you have smooth speech.
It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.
The stammer was a way of telling the world that he was not like others, a way of expressing his singularity.
I had this terrible stammer, so I couldn't really speak properly until I was 16 or 17.