Word: stammers
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Bennett was a child of the Midland slums, the son of a domineering and ambitious pawnbroker father who eventually became a fairly prosperous solicitor. Handicapped by a stammer that in childhood made him jerk epileptically and bite the air, he grew up painfully shy and covered his shyness with the show-off's mantle. He was as frugal as a ragpicker, carefully kept a record of each shilling tip, constantly worried about money...
...afflicted with a humiliating stammer, the young Maugham recoiled in misery from the hostile new environment. At the vicarage, his uncle pumped him so full of religion that Maugham ultimately rejected God; he remained a nonbeliever all his life. At King's School in Canterbury, classmates and even the headmaster mocked his speech impediment. These unhappy transplanted years were later to appear in Of Human Bondage, the most intensely autobiographical of his novels. Even years later, he was unable to read it without tears...
...longtime (since 1931) University of Iowa speech pathologist, himself a onetime tongue-tied stutterer, who could barely get his name out when he registered at Iowa's pioneer speech clinic in 1926, conquered his defect and went on to write a famed series of studies indicating that children stammer most often because of "conscientious but misunderstanding listeners, usually mothers," trying overly hard to cure what are only natural defects in early speech; of arteriosclerosis; in Iowa City...
Those who like their entertainment well-slicked with Hollywood grease with find the documentary technique irritating. Characters stammer, tangle lines; the photographer zooms in for close-ups with all the subtlety of a TV camera chasing a foul ball into the bleachers; nothing climatic, or scary, or terribly funny ever happens. Me, I thought the method, endlessly exciting--if only as a harbinger of low-budget honesty to come. (The distributors insist on classing their films with David and Lisa. It's much, much better...
This is not to detract from MacLean's accomplishment, for he most certainly has the knack, and he is both moving and horrifying. He makes excellent use of a stammer as a verbal pivot on which to make some of the many sudden changes of mood required of him. Furiously angry, he catches on a word, his hand moves to his mouth, and his assertiveness turns into fear. At other times he freezes for a moment, before delivering a pathetic non sequitur...