Suboptimist

Rob is a brilliant orator…

Seriously, though, speech has never been my forte. Perhaps it is this that influenced my profound interest in language: the answer to the question of why people speak the way they do, be it well or poorly. I’ll talk about that some other time. As for now, let me give you an overview of what my speech impediment was:

Like most young children, I struggled to pronounce the sound [r]. The difference with me, however, was that unlike most children who pronounce the sound as [w], I pronounced it as either a long vowel, [a:] as in father, or the diphthong [au] is in kraut, usually the former. Without getting too deeply into the phonetics of English, there are two common ways to articulate this consonant: a retroflex with the tongue pointed up or an approximant with the tongue pointed down. I could do the latter, which was demonstrated in my ability to pronounce words like tree and repay. Notice, the [r] in each word is followed by the vowel [i:]. Today I still pronounce [r] followed by [i] as an approximant, while I pronounce it as a retroflex everywhere else.

I remember well the numerous meetings with a private speech pathologist before I started grade school and the tongue exercises prescribed me. Some involved putting my tongue in the retroflex position and squirting the back of my tongue with water. That was not very enjoyable. After I started elementary school, I started leaving class to meet with the district-provided pathologist. He was much more fun. His exercises consisted of card games where I was made to practice pronouncing words with [r] in the aforementioned environments. Candy was usually involved. Repeated practice was, for me anyway, more beneficial than the tongue exercises ever could have been.

By third grade, I could pronounce the sound perfectly, save on one word which I later mastered. Unfortunately, I traded one speech impediment for another: I developed a pretty bad stutter. There isn’t a lot to say about the stutter other than that I grew out of it at some point. Well, I didn’t really grow out of it, but I found that it doesn’t rear its head around people I am comfortable with. In other circumstances, I just keep my mouth shut. That is why I rarely opened my mouth in sociolinguistics.