My friend Elliot

Thursday 8th October 2026

A man with a London street as a backdrop, smiling

Steve

Steve Fallon shares his childhood memories of a classmate who stammered, and sheds light on how Americans distinguish 'stammering' and 'stuttering'.

I wouldn't normally be able to pinpoint the exact year I met Elliot. But peering through the mists of decades past I can make out the face of a familiar-looking nun, a black-and-white figure in a monochrome dream, the coif high on her head and the wimple framing her face starched razor sharp. Sister Antonita, our teacher in the 4^th grade — the American equivalent of Year 5 in the UK. We'd be aged nine or 10. Young enough not to know what a stutter was.

That's what s'ta ('sister' in Bostonian English) said Elliot had. I was captivated immediately. Language — especially the foreign variety — had always fascinated me. When a woman from Berlin moved into the neighbourhood, I begged her to teach me words and phrases. But I was sceptical when she said, "Das Gras ist grün". It just didn't sound foreign enough for me.

I decided Elliot was speaking a foreign language, and I wondered how I could go about learning it. But then Sister Antonita told the class that Elliot "cannot find his words" and judging from the resulting giggles and Elliot's scarlet face, I saw that this was not something a stutterer was proud of. "Could I help him find his words?" I asked Sister Antonita. "Could I reach in and just pull them off his tongue?" The loud guffaws from the class bullies told me that Elliot would be their next victim. They'd already finished with 'Sissy Steve'.

"Could I help him find his words?" I asked Sister Antonita. "Could I reach in and just pull them off his tongue?"

As bullied brothers, Elliot and I became fast friends. Like most non-stutterers, I tried at first to help him find those words, guessing what he was about to say next or attempting to finish his sentences. But I learned quicky from his anxious and very strained facial expressions and tightening jaw that he was going to do this alone. His raised index figure was a warning to me to keep my mouth shut.

I knew Elliot was visiting a speech therapist and partly believed that one day he would walk into class, open his mouth and let his words soar on their own. But as time went on, I saw that he would have days when his stuttering would decrease and others when he would have difficulty releasing even a couple of 'easy' words and just remain silent. There didn't seem to be any real pattern, but when he didn't come to school for a few days in a row I knew the bullies had focused on him again and the mocking had just got too much. I would miss Elliot and what we jokingly referred to as 'the waiting game' at these times.

But this bullying only occurred during those infrequent moments when Sister Antonita turned her back on the class. Back in those days and particularly in a Catholic school where members of the Congregation of St Joseph taught almost all of the classes, discipline was never an issue. Classrooms and its pupils were ruled by the ruler, a heavy strip of metal seldom used for the purpose it was made — to measure something or draw a straight line — but a convenient tool to administer punishment square on the knuckles of young offenders.

Cultural differences

In the USA, the condition the American Psychiatric Association officially labels 'Childhood-Onset Fluency Disorder' is called stuttering (or a stutter) in everyday speech, by doctors and in educational settings. Stammering (or a stammer) is primarily the term used in the UK to describe this condition.

Confusing the issue is that many people in America believe that a 'stammer' describes a brief, situational hesitation caused by nervousness or surprise, whereas a 'stutter' means the ongoing speech condition that disrupts the smooth flow of talking, with repetitions, stretches of sounds or intermittent blockages where no sound comes out. Speech-language pathologists make no such distinction though most casual speakers do.

Recently I was leading a small American group through the Churchill War Rooms in London as a Blue Badge Tourist Guide, and we stopped to examine the golden locks snipped from the young Winston's forehead on display and read a placard describing his mostly unhappy boyhood. It described him as being very lonely at Harrow, a poor student and having a stammer. "What was the big deal?" asked one of my clients. "Doesn't everyone stammer at some stage?"

It's not a comment you would normally expect to hear in Britain.

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