Every once in a while — usually whilst the old brain is in neutral — I have A Thought.
So … there I was, running a razor on autopilot, when It Hit Me:
Why the hell does ‘lisp’ have an ‘s’ in it?
Petty cruelty? “We’re going to give your affliction a name you’ll never, ever be able to pronounce!”
Field-expedient testing? “If you can say it, then you obviously ain’t got it.”
Hmm.
Now, back to scraping stubble.
LawDog
If you can say regurgitate you’re not doing it.
Because it was so much fun to make the lispers try to say it.
(Hey, it’s not as bad as public hangings. Until Edison invented the phonograph and movies, people had to roll their own entertainment most of the time, and it wasn’t pretty…)
That drove me nuts as a kid and has bugged me every since. As someone how had a lisp and went to speech therapy every week in elementary school to banish it I wanted to smack everyone who asked me why I went. Cruel, so so cruel.
It’s from the Old English “wlispian”, to stammer or speak uncertainly, or to speak like a child.
Which is probably fairly easy for a stammerer to say — all liquids.
Probably, me boy, for the same reason that “Phoenetic” isn’t spelled phonetically.
And why I can’t think of anything to remind me of what “mnemonic” means.
😉
I genuinely used to wonder, having read the Declaration of Independence, if they didn’t speak with a lisp back in the 18th century.
Shibboleth.
I hate it when you zing me like this…… Now I”m going to be spending HOURS trying to figure out other words…. 🙁 😉
I’ve always (as a sufferer) had a similar opinion about ‘dyslexic’…
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- Fear of long words
We’re an atypical dyslexic in our family whose motto is the old saw, “Dyslexics of the world, untie!”
I know, bad, bad.
LawMom
Did you ever read a novel where one of the characters goes something like this: “Grrr” he hissed.
Now how can you hiss with no ssss?
I had an Early American literature class in which assigned reading was photocopied centuries-old texts. In these, nearly every S looked like the f-hole on a violin. I enjoyed reading them aloud, and pronouncing them all as “f” sounds. I didn’t absorb much of the text during those excursions, but I was entertained mightily. That’s the kind of hairpin I am.
I always thought a lisp was a rather adorable quality. Here’s to the nonconformist.