Lisp
A definition of "lisp" from
Webster's Dictionary, 1913 edition.
'Lisp' and 'lisping' are very old
terms
The
1913 Webster's Dictionary definition of lisping as a difficulty
saying /s/ and /z/ is
comparatively recent! "Lisp" and 'lisping' are very old vernacular terms, readily
understood, over several centuries, by people in the community.
Artifice and
affectation
William
Shakespeare's Hamlet, famous
for his poor opinion of women (remember "frailty thy
name is woman"?), exhorted Ophelia to
"Get thee to a nunnery…" in order to cure her of her
artifice and affectation. Driving the point home, he said of women in general,
"God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another;
you jig, you amble, and you lisp...".
Baggage
Some
individuals, including some speech-language pathologists, do not
like the term lisp, perceiving it to carry a lot of baggage, and
would prefer it not to be used in professional contexts.
Specifically, people in the
gay
community may object to the term lisp, especially when it is used in a
pejorative, disparaging or belittling way.
SLPs say it too
Although
some SLPs object to the use of the term "lisp", and even
though it
really is a lay term for one manifestation of functional
speech disorder, because it is in such common use and so
well-understood, speech-language
pathologists sometimes use the term "lisp" too, when talking to
consumers about difficulty pronouncing
the /s/ and /z/ sounds.
What kind of
"lisp"?
When
SLPs use the word lisp they usually clarify what type of lisp they
mean (e.g., interdental lisp, palatal lisp, interdental or frontal
lisp, dentalised lisp).
The various types of lisp
are described
here.
An eclectic selection of
lisping links
Blaise
Blaise,
from the French or Latin, is a male or female given-name that means 'one who lisps or stammers'.
John
McCarthy
John McCarthy was Professor
of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1962 to 2001. His
research was and is mainly in artificial intelligence. In 1958 he
originated the Lisp programming language (the second oldest after
Fortran) and the initial research on general purpose time-sharing
computer systems. He is generally credited with inventing the term
"artificial intelligence".
Where
did Spaniards get their lisp?
Do you like myths?
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