The Hardest Word to Say is ‘Stutter’

Verbal stammerers are easy enough to interpret. For instance, when a stammering school headmaster says, ‘You’re going to get the cocaine,’ we anticipate a dose of corporal punishment more than we do a drugs push. But what about people who develop a stammer communicating with sign language? In signing, the word ‘coat’ is got over with the action of hefting a coat over the shoulders (although how you then finesse that to say ‘jacket’ or ‘jerkin’ is of interest, or yet to be pioneered). The signing stammerer will however put on many coats. The message is ambiguous. His audience will be left wondering: ‘Am I communicating with a stammerer or somebody with a circulatory problem?’

Broadening out slightly from this observation, we ask ourselves should we need to rewrite history? And why? Revisit footage of Adolf Hitler delivering his haunting speeches and we see why. In Hitler, we recognise a stammering signer. We realise that the hand signals he makes, he repeats several times over (see clip). Revisionists will say that the hard-of-hearing attending his rallies would have been quite sympathetic towards the Nazi leader, commonly remarking: ‘I haven’t a clue what he’s saying, but that Fuhrer’s got himself a terrible stammer’. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Fire Drills and the Hitler Moustache

It has long been a fear of the author to be mistaken accidentally for a Nazi having been forced to break off from shaving in response to a fire alarm and gather outside his residence with the other tenants from his building. It’s a relatively niche phobia, but it stems from my shaving routine which is to shave the ‘handles’ first before moving onto the bit under the nose (a process that could be technically termed ‘filtrum depilation’). Dropping everything at that point in time would result therefore in the sporting of an inadvertent Hitler moustache. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)