On a daily basis I have stuttering conversations, worry I've upset people when I haven't, get confused when people don't specify things, nearly walk into people because I can't work out which way they want to go past me, and suffer from prolonged tiredness because of the mental energy expended trying to understand all this.
At work today, Luce is efficient, humorless, revered by colleagues; arrives always at 9 15, leaves at 6, carrying armfuls of work, talks jerkily, carefully, avoiding visitor's eye; stutters in conversation, never in speechmaking.
I thought back to the stolid denizens of the SWPL class in their distant, kitschy watering holes quaking with fear and social anxiety, clutching Collins glasses to their chests and stuttering through conversations on quantitative easing and Lady Gaga minutiae.
That is not to say that it is easy, or without its pitfalls (the phone is far from my preferred means of communication), but the inherent vulnerability of stuttering creates conversations that quickly move beyond the superficial and tap into something more profound.
Blank stares and non sequiturs abound, from the moment where Señora Ramirez's memory "seemed suddenly to have failed her" during the seduction in A Guatemalan Idyll (1944), to the bizarrely stuttering, ambiguously homoerotic conversation between an American and a Moroccan in Everything Is Nice (1951).
Most conversation stutters with tentative tics ("like" and "you know"), prompts for affirmation, as though no one wants to risk offending with a definite statement.
My brother and coach, David, who was on a squad with the national team at the time, phoned me and we stuttered through a conversation of sorts.
It must have occurred to him that I wasn't a member of the clan, and that I wasn't married yet, because he suddenly blushed and started to stutter, bringing our conversation to an end.
But the incident at Starbucks did surprise me in one way: After the barista openly mocked the customer, Sam, for his stutter — first in conversation and again by printing his drink label in a pejorative fashion ("SSSam") — people took action.
For the conversation task, stuttering was reduced more when the device was worn in the left ear.
Sometimes, after stuttering in a group conversation, I'd wished that I'd never said anything at all.
