May the Forth be with Colin

I had a lisp when I was a kid, as did several of my friends. Also like many young folks, I never heard mine.

Occasionally I would get teased about my lisping, but most people either ignored it entirely or teased me gently about it. So it didn’t seem to me to be a big deal when I was growing up.

Only when I enrolled at the University of Iowa as a 20-year-old junior, and the staffer at the registrar’s desk said, “You know, we can cure that lisp,” did I decide I might want to see what they could do about it.

What really brought me up short was listening to the tape recording my therapist made of me as I read a passage aloud. I immediately realized what I’d sounded like all those years.

The U of I has a nationally recognized speech therapy program, and after three weeks I was no longer lisping (“lithping,” as I used to pronounce it.) 

My lisp was of the frontal variety. 

That’s when the tongue sticks slightly out between the front teeth when you’re saying a word with the letter “s” or “z” in it. A related type is when the speaker says those letters with the tongue touching the back of the front teeth.

Two other types are the lateral lisp, where air escapes around the sides of the tongue when the letter is said, and the palatal lisp, when the letter is pronounced with the tongue on the palate (the top of the mouth).

What reminded me recently of my younger speech was a conversation I had with 6-year-old grandson Colin at his sister’s soccer game in Adel last Saturday.

Colin and I are good buddies. He likes to visit with Kathy and me when our families get together, sitting on our laps and discussing things of importance to him.

Like “Star Wars.”

Colin focuses on “Star Wars” to an impressive degree. He worked himself through a Spider-Man phase. Now he’s all “Star Wars” all the time, 24/7, at least when we’re around. He knows every character, every “episode” of the multi-film “Star Wars” saga.

So last Saturday, sitting on my lap at Norah’s soccer game, he offered to hum for me a musical theme from one of the episodes. I said I’d like to hear it, so he came forth with a rendition of a “Star Wars” theme. Impressive humming.

Colin: “Do you know which episode that’s from?”

Me: “No I don’t, Colin.”

Colin: “I’ll hum it again” (not knowing that I have seen only three or four of the saga’s episodes). And he did, exactly like his first hum.

Me: “Sorry, Colin, I don’t know that song.”

Colin: “I’ll give you a hint. It’s from the final prequel.”

Me: “I still don’t know it, Colin. I guess you’ll have to tell me.”

Colin: “It’s from ‘Revenge of the Thith’.”

I knew he was saying “Revenge of the Sith.” I haven’t seen that one, but I knew the title. So I thought I’d repeat it as he said it, to see if he would overlook my lisping it back at him.

Me: “Oh. ‘Revenge of the Thith’.”

Colin: “No, no. ‘Revenge of the Thith’.”

He heard my lisp, but didn’t pick up on his own. Just as I hadn’t during my childhood years.

I expect he’ll outgrow it, as most kids do. (I’ll be sorry when that happens, because it’s really cute.)

Many youngsters when they first start to talk pronounce “s” and “z” with a frontal lisp, as I did and as Colin does. His lisp is slight, and probably won’t last nearly as long as mine did. In today’s elementary schools, kids get early help with their pronunciation if they need it, and most lisps disappear on their own after a few years anyway.

I was more than ready to shed mine when I heard it played back to me at Iowa. Especially when I heard myself declaim in a Humanities class a couple of weeks after my therapy began.

The class was discussing the work of the philosopher Georg Hegel. Hegel developed a theory about how history works upon which Karl Marx later built his hypothesis about the class struggle in capitalism.

Hegel referred to his theory as “the dialectic.” He believed that human history is composed of its current situation — the thesis — which is then challenged by a change — the antithesis — and moves on to a new status that combines the two situations — the synthesis.

I was unfortunate enough to have that seminar discussion take place just as I had suddenly become aware of my lisp. Consequently I heard myself describe the Hegelian dialectic: “Firtht you have the thethith, which ith challenged by the antithethith, and the two form a new thynthethith.”

I should have let thomeone elthe in the clath anthwer the quethtion. 

It provided a huge incentive, though, to concentrate on my speech therapy exercises, and my lisp disappeared shortly thereafter.