About the Author: My name is Finnian Galbraith and I’m a person who stutters from Aotearoa-New Zealand. The international stuttering community is relatively new territory for me but I’m a big advocate for us stutterers speaking up and sharing our experiences however we can and see fit. I’m a Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Technician by trade, as well as an Anthropology and Japanese graduate (peculiar combination I know!). In my spare time, I’m usually out on the football field, writing or DJing.

There’s a concept in Spanish football called ’la pausa’, translating literally as ‘the pause’. It refers to a player’s ability to slow the game down at the right moment, to hold off on playing a pass for a second or two in order to gain an advantage- waiting for a defender to be drawn out of position or space to open up. Potential GOAT manager Pep Guardiola is a big fan and David Silva, one of his former stars at Manchester City, is the la pausa poster child. Legends like Iniesta, Messi and Gundogan are also recognised as masters of the pause. These players are able to have tremendous influence on a game by using their unreal technical skills and ability to read other players’ movements to adjust the rhythm of the match and create opportunities. 

As you progress through the levels of football, as in many sports, speed is key. Most basic skills remain the same but a major thing that sets a Premier League player apart from a Sunday league player, for example, is the pace at which they can execute these skills. But at the highest level, where speed is kind of ‘maxed out’, la pausa flips this on its head somewhat. 

Sometimes playing a pass as soon as it’s on doesn’t lead to the best outcome, especially when the opposition is expecting and operating at that fast pace. The principle here is that efficiency isn’t always the way. Sure, playing a through ball to a speedy winger will often lead to good results but adjusting game rhythm can be just as effective (I mean look at the success of the 2008-12 Spanish team, who dominated European and world football without any midfield/forward known for pace in the starting lineups). Changing the tempo creates new spaces to exploit, a sort of depatterning (more on that later) that challenges and disrupts the efficiency that is expected and demanded in top-tier football.

Where else do we find a situation with rhythm at its core, where efficiency is the norm? Conversation of course. In a normal conversational ‘dance’, the turn-taking rhythm can be coordinated at beats of 0.2 seconds (Collins, 2014). Pretty damn quick, and easy to fall outside of and disrupt. For someone with a stutter, disrupting this rhythm in a major way can be a near certainty. I’ll often get stuck on the ‘f’ of my name for ~3 seconds or a whopping 15 conversational beats. 

It’s easy to understand a lot of reactions people have to a stutter given this. The tempo of the interactional dance has been thrown off and they can no longer rely on their subconscious metronome to determine the conversation’s rhythm. This can create a mild sense of panic and confusion. But is this actually a bad thing?

What if (finally getting to the whole point of this piece) a stutter influencing a conversation through pausing and changing rhythm is less of a communication breakdown and more of an equivalent to la pausa influencing a football game through delaying and adjusting tempo? Let’s look at some potential benefits of stuttered conversation. 

When a conversational rhythm is disrupted, you have two options. You could laugh, scoff or throw insults at the stutterer. This is also known as discrimination (not typically preferable). Alternatively, you can accept the situation that neither of you have control over, wait for the words to arrive and then proceed with the yarn as usual. This is also known as patience, a top-tier virtue and the first thing that stuttering can teach us. When talking to a stutterer, it’s kind of inevitable that some waiting will be involved- pauses and extended/repeated syllables are kind of a stutter’s whole bit. The more this happens, the more (theoretically) you should feel okay with less ‘efficient’ conversation: patience and empathy increase. 

To offer a more radical view, you’re also taking part in an act of resistance against dominant temporal norms. Efficient comms is great for (and demanded by) capitalism and its lust for productivity but why should we need to carry this rush and stress into all conversations? Within the dominant “straight-masculine time” (St. Pierre, 2015) order, time becomes a kind of commodity and those who can not ‘effectively’ utilise time with fluent speech often face discrimination. Enjoying and normalising conversation that doesn’t perfectly fit the efficiency bill is a pretty cool and easy way to push back against this exclusionary time order.  

But beyond being something to patiently wait through or a tool with which to challenge the system, I do think stuttering itself has immense value. Far from an ‘error’, a stammer is merely an intriguing feature of language, exposing and highlighting fun and fascinating sides of spoken words that we don’t often hear.

There’s a particular kind of anticipation that builds during a stuttering moment, when you’re not sure what is going to be said and you actually have the space to wonder what it might be. There’s a unique joy and exhilaration in a moment of lost control and uncertainty that “resolves itself so beautifully sometimes”, to quote Emma Alpern (2019). Repeated syllables or prolonged sounds can actually sound really cool (I recall one specific instance of my stutter sounding like an impromptu perfect 4 beats at ~130bpm- sick) and break apart components of language into their most basic form.

At an overarching level, stuttering is a form of depatterning, a break from normal order resulting in different, creative expressions. Depatterning, in its many forms, is essential for human development. If we constantly stick to our same routines and structures, it’s very difficult to innovate and adapt to changing environments. This is why cultural or technological change often comes from those marginalised by society, why new ideas are commonly thought of by people with neurodivergence. Different ways of thinking and living are a break from typical, ‘normal’ structures of thought, and this is a fantastic space for variation, innovation and improvement. 

Stuttering can be a similar catalyst for language. It can be confronting and it’s certainly unique but stammered speech is a creative and different take on usual conversation. This can be revealing or at least challenging to our dominant ideas of a yarn, creating a more open environment for language expression. 

My medium football-obsessed brain sees this as similar to the space and new opportunities that David Silva creates when he is able to pause and slow things down in a game typically characterised by speed and efficiency. It feels counter-intuitive at first but adjusting a rhythm inherently opens up more pockets- for through balls and verbal expression alike. Of course, there is a major difference in intentions: Silva very deliberately delays his passes while stutterers don’t really have a choice when disfluency pops up. But the effect- a change in tempo and resulting opportunities- is much the same. 

‘Conversational la pausa’- at the very least a mindset that makes my stutter feel more like an Iniesta-esque assist instead of a misplaced pass. And something which highlights that, although stuttering is certainly not without its challenges, it’s also one of our strengths.

References

Alpern, E. (2019). Why stutter more. Stammering pride and prejudice, 2.

Collins, Randall (2014). Interaction ritual chains. Vol. 62. Princeton University Press.

Pierre, J. S. (2015). Distending straight‐masculine time: A phenomenology of the disabled speaking body. Hypatia, 30(1), 49-65.