The Indians Have No Word for It* I. Stuttering in Children

ILLIAM NUTTALL, an English stutterer, writing in the journal Psyche, in 1937, said, in effect, that whoever finds a cure for stuttering will have found a cure for all the ills of society .. We should not permit his possible exaggeration to distract us from the peculiarly fundamental wisdom which he expressed . In a sense, what he said of stuttering might also be said of such other perplexing forms of behavior as thumb-sucking, or nervousness, worry, gossiping, etc . Mr. Nuttall elaborated his point by saying that he seldom if ever stuttered when alone (as is true of stutterers generally), but only when speaking to other people, so that whatever the causes of his disorder, they must lie in those other people quite as much as in himself. In his own way, Mr. Nuttall was pointing a finger in the direction of semantic environmentl-the environment of attitudes and evaluations, opinions and beliefs-as a source of his difficulties .