October 22: International Stuttering Awareness Day

This date was declared International Stuttering Awareness Day in 1998 by several speech and language associations around the world, to raise public awareness of the millions of people, including some three million Americans, who have this speech disorder. Mercaz Kvad Peh, the Jewish Stuttering Association, established in 2010, estimates that half a million Jews worldwide are affected by stuttering. (Experts generally agree that stuttering occurs in all cultures and races at rates of about 1% of the general population and 5% of young children.) Mythologically, the best known Jewish or Jewis-linked stutterers have been Moses, who describes himself to God in the Torah as “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue,” and whom the Talmudic rabbis deemed a stutterer, and the Warner Brothers’ Porky Pig, who was given voice and a stammer by Mel Blanc. Other famous Jewish stutterers have been Carly Simon, Robert Merrill, Bud Schulberg, Marilyn Monroe, and Harvey Keitel. “About 75 percent of children who begin to stutter between the ages of two and five really do get better without any formal intervention. And then there’s that 25 percent that require some sort of therapy.” —Dr. Trisha Zebrowski Watch “Let Me Finish,” a short documentary on stuttering: