The Lisp

"Thufferin Thuccotash"

 
Losing my two front teeth was a right of passage for me as it is for any child, but it also had an unfortunate consequence.  I developed a very pronounced lisp.  The lisp worsened during the summer between first and second grade so much that I sounded like a parody of a child talking.  Sure, cute for a toddler, but a seven year old child who lisps sounds retarded. My S sounds were definitely Eth sounds and sounding stupid in the new advanced learning second grade was just not allowed.   It just so happened that this improved school had a speech therapist who began to work with me to correct this problem.

Her name was Miss Simpson, or as I said it Mith  Thimthun.  She was beautiful, young and had a very positive attitude.  I liked her immediately.  She took the time to explain to me in great detail what a lisp was (a soft th sound instead of the hard SSS) and why she thought I had such a strong lisp (the missing two front teeth).

Now before she explained it to me I didn't even know what people were talking about when they said I had a lisp.  I thought they were saying there was something wrong with my lips, that they were backwards or something.   I had spent several anxious minutes looking into the mirror trying to see what was so obvious to everyone else.  My mouth looked normal to me, so I was confused.  It wasn't even apparent to me that people were talking about my abnormal pronunciation of the S sound.  Either I wasn't paying attention or this was one of those times the adults talked about it amongst themselves while not bothering to mention the issue to the child in question.  Sort of like how they decided when you needed your next round of inoculations - better to keep the child in the dark so there was less screaming.

It might sound strange, but at first I could not hear how my pronunciation of the S sound was different from anyone else.  To my ears, SSS was the same as eththth so Miss Simpson first had to teach me how to hear the difference.  She did this with a device I immediately coveted and wanted to bring home with me.  It was a recording device that read a magnetic tape that was at the bottom of a long card.  You would place the card upright with the tape placed between a couple of wheels on the devices top.  You pushed a button and the wheels pulled the card from one side of the device to the other.  While the card was in transit you were supposed to speak, but you had to do it quickly because the card finished its trip in about 5 seconds.  When the card was finished you put it into the machine again, pushed another button and then you got to hear what you said.

Miss Simpson asked me to say the phrase: "My sister is Sally."   I stopped her.  "No, that's our dog's name."  She said since we wanted to work on my S sounds I should use the sentence as is.  I was a little leery of doing this because I feared what might happen if someone heard this obvious lie I was being asked to tell, but since I was eager to see the machine in action I complied.  She ran the machine and when I finished speaking she ran the card back through.  I got to hear my voice on tape for the first time.  It sounded like "My thithter ith Thally."  I was appalled.  That could not have possibly been me.  I didn't sound like that!  I looked at her in horror with my hands over my mouth.  She said, "Don't worry sweety, I know it sounds strange the first time you hear your voice."  She continued, "Now you know what you sound like, so we can begin to help you make your S sounds better."  I was rather unsure at that point about the whole thing, but since she didn't make me do another tape or listen to that wretched machine voice again I grudgingly agreed to play along.

What I learned was that my lisp was my tongues fault.  My tongue did not know where it belonged when I made the sound S.  Instead of behaving properly it jutted forward like a fat snake tongue.  Since I didn't have any front teeth to stop its progress it ended up sloppily getting in the way and flattening out the proper sound.  I was furious with my tongue but since I didn't have any front teeth I couldn't effectively bite it to show it how mad I was.  Betrayed by my own body part and there I was only seven years old.  I laid my head on the desk in a dejected attitude.

Miss Simpson was also a stickler for proper posture so she made me sit up and showed me the first of many times how to make my tongue behave.  First we practiced touching the tip of the tongue to the roof of our mouths.  She would show me with her own tongue and then ask me to do the same.  We did this time after time as I would meet with her twice a week.  We eventually refined the roof of the mouth touching so that I was bringing my tongue tip closer and closer  to the edge of my gums, where my teeth would eventually reappear.  Once I had my tongue in the right position I was supposed to try and blow air across it to make the S sound.  At the end of each session I got to make another recording with the machine.

After a couple of weeks my pronunciation had improved markedly.  Miss Simpson must have been contracted to be with me a certain number of weeks because by the third week my lisp had virtually disappeared yet we still met together.  To use up our time she challenged me to come up with more and more sentences where every word began with S.  The biggest part of the challenge was that I would have to say these sentences in the five seconds the tape would record.  My favorite constructed phrase was "Silly Sam says something silly."  She applauded my achievement. 

Finally we had our last session together and I never met with Miss Simpson again.  Our brief encounter altered my life in a positive way and at the time I didn't even know the importance of what she had done.  By teaching me to overcome my lisp she alleviated an issue that could have left a negative impression on everyone I would ever meet.  We put a lot of stock into how a person speaks and an obvious speech impediment reduces a person in our eyes.  We rate people according to their accents as well assigning negative qualities to colloquial pronunciations.

My work with Miss Simpson taught me to appreciate the spoken language and to pay attention to how I was speaking.  I began to listen to how others were speaking but more importantly I paid attention to the 'proper' way to say things, shunning local accents.  As a result I have virtually no regional accent of any type.  Many people when I first meet them ask me where I am from since there are no telling signs in my speech.  They are certain I could not be from Texas, but I have lived here all my life.  I just make sure when I speak to get my tongue in the right place.