Cultural

[the open secret is] a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.

— François (1999)

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Homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.

— de Villier (2012)

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Linking the stutter and the unspeakable are logics of subterfuge, to be sure, but I find that Sedgwick’s construction of the “open secret” more closely relates to the kind of secrets that animate stuttering. The open secret is a form of coded disclosure that Sedgwick links to the closet, and it mobilizes language around the secret in order to disclose only to those in the know and hide from those on the outside. Anne-Lise Francois describes it as “a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.” The open secret is that which everyone knows but cannot discuss. I select this construction for the stutter because, while some stutterers can and do pass as fluent and come out of the closet by a discursive disclosure like “I stutter,” more often, the stuttered voice betrays her before any such disclosure can be made, and knowledge of the stutter is created without being acted upon or acknowledged. The stutter’s unspeakability is subtended by its audibility and uncontrollability. Sedgwick’s example of the open secret actually comes from a text featuring a stutterer, Herman Melville’s short story, Billy Budd. However, it is not the eponymous character’s stutter that reveals the structure of the open secret for Sedgwick but rather the possibility of mutiny onboard the ship on which Billy is impressed.

Like queerness, certain forms of discrimination against stutterers or unwanted social interactions often express themselves through a desire to know, and to know it as a symptom. Nicholas de Villier in The Opacity of the Closet argues that it is important to pay attention to the ways that “homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.” Similarly, stutterers often encounter the diagnostic desires of others, the desire to know why and from whence. An example from my childhood: I was at summer camp and sitting in the camp nurse’s office for something mild. The nurse asked me questions about myself and I answered. Then we changed topics and I talked to her about my brother. She interrupted me and said, “did you know you only stuttered when you were talking about yourself, not your brother?” The nurse created her own interruption in my speech as if to master my stutter with her own impediment, and sought to psychologize the root of it as a symptom. This diagnostic desire is a practice of what Sedgwick calls, in a different work, paranoid reading, a kind of analytic reading that seeks to treat the text as a puzzle or stratagem to be untangled. Stuttering attracts this desire to know, in part, because it is an exemplary object of non-knowing. No one knows why people stutter. The stutter speaks to a great opacity within us, and that opacity might be productive of a different way of understanding the self and its relations to others.

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Society will not tolerate… that I should be… nothing, or, more precisely, that the something I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant.    

— Barthes (1981)

This ‘still-here’ can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and not just verbally – ‘corresponding’ to something.

In other words: language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which, however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens.

This ‘still-here’ of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature.

This shows the poem yet more clearly as one person’s language become shape and, essentially, a presence in the present.

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.

Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?‍

I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find a… meridian.

With you and Georg Büchner and the State of Hesse, I believe I have just touched it again.

— Celan (1960)

To stutter is often to feel the edges and the walls of lamguage, in the mouth, in the glottis, on the face, in the chest. It can be to experience those parts of language which do not signify but that force us to encounter the stuff that language is made of and the other buccal functions from which language is inseparable, such as eating, breathing, chocking, kissing, humming, hissing, coughing, drinking, sucking, vomiting, licking, swallowing, wheezing, and blowing. We often avoid paying attention to the stuff of language because it reminds us of the mechanical and involuntary crust upon the transparent flow of social and economic institutions and the rational expectations of social interactions.

I have two examples about what it might mean to experience the matter of language queered. The first I’ll call wood, and it comes from the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben. Agamben writes in his essay “The Idea of Matter:”

“There where language ends is not where the unsayable begins, but rather the matter of language. He who has never reached, as in a dream, that woodlike substance of language that the ancients called silva remains, even when he is silent, a prisoner to representations.”  

— Agamben.

This is a very loaded assertion, but by “prisoner to representations” Agamben is referring to a use of language that is reduced to transparent meaning, pre signification, supple communication, and pure intelligibility that conceals the medium of that which you use to communicate. You’re a fly in a box who doesn’t see the glass walls. Silva, meaning wildwood, is also a term for a poetic form enjoyed by the ancient Romans, and it trades on its metaphorical meaning as material for construction. If language is woodlike, it has a texture, a grain, colour, rings. It is hard while it can be broken down, built up, pulped, and refigured. It is attached to non-wood things like leaves. Agamben’s reference to the dream gives it a more ethereal resonance. Without going too deeply into the dream theory, Freud noticed that words are often treated in dreams as though they were things. Jean-Francois Lyotard provides an example from a poster of what dreaming does to language. In Frédéric Rossif’s poster Révolution d'Octobre, the words are physically folded as if rippled on a 3D surface by the wind, and the letters become distorted. Conor Foran’s stuttering font is another example of the distortion of words by the pressures of desire upon language. Language can do a great deal outside of representation.

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“One of these days I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have to be read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues.

— Sedaris (2000)

In the first short story of David Sedaris’s 2000 collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris recounts four months of his 4th grade year, in which he was removed from class once a week at 2:30 on Thursdays to meet with the acerbic school speech therapist he called “Agent Samson” to treat his lisp. Her clients were all lisping boys, he noticed, and none of them conventionally boyish, and he jokes that if there were a sign on her door it should not read “Speech Therapy Lab” but “Future Homosexuals of America.” At this young age Sedaris already has an inkling that speech impediment, in his case lisping, is related to sexuality, a personal affectation continuous with a dislike of sports or a love of making one’s own curtains. Sederis taps into a cultural trend that includes the identification “gay voice,” and that states that one can read sexuality off the voice, particularly the male voice, through how one speaks, what one says, or what one does not say.

With expressions like “stuttering pride” and “coming out of the stuttering closet,” activism by people who stutter explicitly ties its historical struggles and political goals to queer liberation, and queer theory has offered a verdant store of language and concepts for re-imagining dysfluent speaking as a kind of queer form of being in the world. Moreover, these intersections point towards the critical potential of the dysfluency itself as a kind of queer object, an object that presents a problem for sexual and gender norms, as well as conventional forms of reading, expression, and time. I am interested in how the experiences of being queer and a stutterer interpenetrate, and how each informs the other. In the few first-person accounts I read from queer people who stutter I often saw the authors comparing their social encounters as queers and as stutterers. One person notes that homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but that stuttering or “child-onset dysfluency disorder” remains. Another said that they were encouraged to embrace their queerness but to cure their stutter, and that speech therapy for them amounted to a form of conversion therapy. What I saw were not necessarily similarities but cases in which people embody two marginal positions, where one could have been treated like the other, and was not. How do queerness and stuttering misconnect with each other? Returning to Sedaris: of interest to us in Sedaris’s story is the detail that there was no sign on Agent Samson’s door, and that “Future Homosexuals of America” does not substitute for other language but for an absence of language. Agent Sampson’s is a door with no writing that suggests that as much as her door clearly opens for a certain kind of boy, it offers no clear language for that child, and the name of the certain type of boy who goes through it for a certain type of speech remains in some sense unspeakable. Sedaris is not cured of his lisp, but rather like many young stutterers develops an enormous vocabulary in order to avoid the sibilant s. The s is occulted in Sedaris’s speech, and this haunting, unspeakable s produces not a reduction in language but an excess of language in the form of the enormous vocabulary. How might we think of writers as people who work by suppressing language? This connection between the unspeakable and the excess of language conceptually ties dysfluency to the emergence of male homosexuality as a pathological category in the 19th century.

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I've had therapy to help deal with the way my parents reacted when I came out, but the therapist never insinuated that things would be easier if I was less gay. On the other hand, the speech therapy I've had as an adult focused very strongly on how things would be easier for me if I was more fluent.

— Elias K (2015)

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Sexuality between men had, throughout the Judaeo-Christian tradition, been famous among those who knew about it at all precisely for having no name – ‘unspeakable,’ ‘unmentionable,’ or ‘not to be named among Christian men’.

— Sedgwick (1985)

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The unspeakable transformed in the 20th century to what she calls a “byword” likely most familiar in Lord Alfred Douglas’s phrase, “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Like Sedaris forming his vocabulary around the absent s, the unspeakability of male homosexuality did not correspond to a dearth of language about it, but what Michel Foucault famously refers to in The History of Sexuality as “a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex… a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” For the Victorians male homosexuality may have been occulted in the language, but:

Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies… There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

— Foucault (1976)

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The Victorians implicitly made the connection between homosexuality and stuttering. James Malcom Rymer’s fictional autobiography The Unspeakable: or, the Life and Adventures of a Stammerer, explores this link. Riley McGuire’s research on this novel argues that attaining mature heterosexual masculinity is predicated on attaining a fluent voice.

Freud’s famous diagnosis of stuttering as anal-sadistic is comprised of a few brief remarks made in passing. His more substantive thoughts on stuttering actually come earlier in a case study about woman with adult-onset stuttering and various neuroses. But the psychoanalytic understanding of stuttering as the unresolved frustrations of the narcissistic tendencies of the anal stage has captured more minds. Stuttering, after all, is the most uncomfortable type of shit-talk. But the threat of stuttering to masculinity also appears to be explained by the impediment’s root in anality, with its association with sexual submission, women, and the end of gender. There is a productive queer reading to be made about the threat of stuttering and the moral panic around sexual submission in gay male culture. At the end of his famous essay Is the Rectum A Grave? Leo Bersani finds in fantasies about the rectum “the place where the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried”. Bersani offers a mythological location in which to reimagine the value of sexual submission. Besides being the “death” of male dominance, the anus is also the death of sexual difference, for we all have one.

• How the meaning/cultural currency of feelings/emotions change over time.
• Emotions as shaped by cultural/political forces‍
• Representation of emotions in literature/film as revealing of the power structures at work.
• ‘Affect’ is used in different ways in different fields (neuroscience, psychology and literary/cultural studies).
• Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai – critics for whom affects are crucially connected to structures of power (social/cultural/political); also interested in how affective states stretch our capacity to name them but haven’t cut loose from language and cognition.
• Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings), she’s interested in those feelings that are seen as unproductive/marginalised.

• One of the hall-marks of affect is ‘In-between-ness’.

… the most fundamental insight of affect theory: that no embodied being is independent but rather is affected by and affects others bodies, profoundly and perpetually as a condition of being in the world.

— Ahern, A Feel for the Text. (2018)

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The challenge for researchers is that affect is not something, but rather is “in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter”; rather than housed in or controlled by the individual, it “arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.

— Ahern, The Affect Reader. (2010)

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• ‘Affect’ as dynamic – emotions not static but in process – changing as they move between bodies.
• Robert Solomon recommended ‘thinking of emotions as acts’, as ‘something we do, not just have’.
• 'Affect’ captures maybe better than emotion that embodied aspect of experience (something felt before it’s understood).

We do not, as scholars from different disciplines, bring together our objects and practices to one another through a kind of free-trade agreement; rather we re-enter a long history of binding, tangling and cutting [across disciplines/practice] within which the current moves towards integration are much more weighted than they might first seem.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

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A ‘dynamic of entanglement’ rather than a push towards integration.

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We have tried to conjure a different palette of affective dispositions through which we might […] live in interdisciplinary spaces. Those dispositions (eddying around ambivalence, awkwardness, frustration, failure and so on) depart from the most common affective registers (critique, adulation, disinterested rigour) through which [many] have tended to approach the terrain of the medical, clinical or biomedical. We want resolutely to claim the stance of interestedness. But we also see interest as a stance that can be (indeed usually is) taken up without someone quite knowing the place at which they stand, or the entwinements through which they are always-already bound with/in others […]. So it is, to be entangled.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

Hercule Poirot: I pity you, Norton… how very sad to find that this great and beautiful world is so foul and disappointing. And your mother, I pity even more.

‍Stephen Norton: M-my m-m-mother? You pity my mother?

Hercule Poirot: To endure the agony of bringing you forth only to discover that she had nurtured in her loins such wickedness – is that not worthy of pity?

Stephen Norton: It is you who is n-not worthy! She m-m-meant the world to m-me!

Hercule Poirot: And you to her?

Stephen Norton: She l-loved me… l-loved me m-m-more than… m-more than…

Hercule Poirot: Did she ever hold you, Norton, as mothers do? Stroke your hair… kiss your cheek?

Stephen Norton: She… she… she…

Hercule Poirot: Scared you, did she not? She pushed you away!

— Christie (1975) ITV adaption (2013)

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.
To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.
To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.

— Virilio (2007)

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Transmission and Social Acceleration

The most obvious, and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of intentional, goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production (2003, 6).

— Rosa (2003, p. 6)

The center of this idea of communication is the transmission of signals or messages for the purpose of control. It is a view of communication from one of the most ancient of human dreams: the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space.

— Carey (2009, p. 12)

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Functional Accidents and Distributed Agency

[an accident is] a failure in a subsystem, or the system as a whole, that damages more than one unit and in doing so disrupts the ongoing or future output of the system.

— Perrow (1999, p. 66)

[O]n June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company.

— Gleik (2012, p. 166)

Who or what is responsible?

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Untidy Systems

Philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled.

— James, (1996, p. 45)

[James takes seriously] a place for something like an element of chanciness or volatility within [the world’s] loose regularities and historical flows.

— Connolly (2005, p. 73)

In an untidy world, the actant is “a being or entity that makes a difference in the world without quite knowing what it is doing [emphasis added]” (Connolly, 2005, p. 72).

Communication as Ritual

• Communication, commonness, communion.
• James Carey: the model directs our attention “not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs".
• Akin to religious mass.
• Akin to reading a paper “[n]ews reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world [emphasis added]” (p. 16).

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Dysfluent Accidents as Ritual

• Carol Padden: Ritual emphasizes “performance, activity, and the materiality of communication itself. In this framework, meaning is not so much the definition of a word or sentence but instead is constructed in situ, in social and cultural activity” (p. 44).
• Unlike sending a message, meaning gets enacted in the very midst of unruly bodies that excrete “all levels of expression, from the minute details of discourse—from pitch, emphasis, gesture, head tilts, and eye gaze” (p. 44).
• Moreover, since communication happens “on site,” time cannot be transcended or otherwise avoided with speed but must be lived through.

• Crossed Wires: perhaps it's not that my grumpy co-worker “misheard” my stuttered speech, but that he didn’t want to listen and did not want to belong in time to a common world with this disabled person.
• The Stall: “Part of it feels like my body goes into a kind of supplication or prayer almost. I have a friend who once referred to it as ‘watching me ask for the word’” (Ellis, 2020, n.p.).
• The misfire: “The unexpectedness of stuttering forces both listener and speaker into a space of trust and vulnerability. They must both give up control of the situation. The person speaking does not know when and for how long they will stutter. Likewise, the person listening does not know when to expect a stutter. In order for both people to communicate, they must trust one another. (Constantino 2016, para. 5)
• Ritual? Anti-ritual?

• ‍The blurt. Stutterers pepper their language with so-called “fillers” that ostensibly sit outside of, and even detract from, the message. We sometimes grimace and groan in the act of speech. In addition, we sometimes find ourselves in the midst of speaking sounds, words, or phrases we didn’t fully intend.‍
• The misfire. The phenomenon of stuttering includes both prolongation and repetition. Stuttering can extend the opening sounds of a message (e.g. ---aaaaaaaagree or bo-bo-bo-book), which an ableist grammar recodes as misfires that communicative parties can tacitly agree to ignore.‍
• The stall. A repetition can be a redundant redundancy (one that serves no discernable purpose), like repeating most of a sentence multiple times to get a “running start” on the difficult finish that was long ago anticipated by our impatient interlocutor. Or, in a hard block, the voice suddenly and unexpectedly runs dry. A word stops in your throat, and you must wait for infra-bodily traffic to clear while the absence of meaning gapes wide and dangerous in the social world.‍
• Crossed wires. A regular experience for stutterers, crossed wires describes the state of “talking past each other” that might begin when one party “mishears” the other and then feedbacks error into the conversation.‍
• The swerve. Clinicians prefer the term “avoidance” to describe the strategy stutterers employ when we sense an oncoming phoneme over which we expect to trip. I might, for example, begin to say “I agree” but change course, swerving around a potential misfire to substitute on the fly: “I don’t know.”‍
• The cut-off. This accident is one of attempted repair, caused when interlocutors or bystanders rush to the scene of an accident, interrupt, and reimpose order by attempting to predict and finish the stalled (or otherwise damaged) message according to a dominant grammar.‍
• The gridlock. Stuttering ferociously at the front of a queue, for example, halts the flow of information, people, and capital; it stalls a lane of traffic and tempts impatient honks in the form of tapped toes and glances, as everyone waits for an undetermined time until information and thus bodies will once again flow free.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (Sept. 17, 2012) — Jane Fraser, president of the Stuttering Foundation, made the following comments concerning the Sept. 15, 2012, Saturday Night Live skit ridiculing those who stutter:

We are deeply troubled by Saturday Night Live’s recent decision to make light of stuttering, a communication disorder faced by more than three million Americans and 68 million people worldwide. The release of The King’s Speech was a giant step forward for the stuttering community, bringing understanding and acceptance to those who stutter. SNL’s poor judgment was an equally huge step backwards.

The most troubling part was the obvious research conducted by producers, writers and cast into stuttering, evidenced by their use of the term ‘fluency.' They clearly did their homework but chose to overlook the pain felt by many who stutter and their families for just a cheap laugh.

The Stuttering Foundation supported SNL’s Seth Meyers when Donald Trump chose to call him out as a ‘stutterer’ after the White House Correspondents’ dinner. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Not funny, SNL. Not funny at all.

— Fraser (2012)

Our starting-point is again ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living.’ Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have just seen, the garment was to the body itself—inert matter dumped down upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be produced as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the other. And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown the soul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. But that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena may be formulated as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OUR ATTENTION TO THE PHYSICAL IN A PERSON WHEN IT IS THE MORAL SIDE THAT IS CONCERNED.

— Bergson (1912)

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Bergson’s theory that laughter functions as social correction

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

— Bergson (1912)

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In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but then it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease to change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a like animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the complete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.

We begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.

The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.

— Bergson (1912)

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Alanka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008)

• Zupančič argues Bergson misunderstood the primary thrust of his theory that we laugh when we recognize the mechanical encrusted upon the living.
• The missed revelation of Bergson’s theory is comedy’s unceasing vacillations between the living and the mechanical.

I would say in a few words that if either of these methods is able to be adopted with success on occasions in an easy and agreeable manner, a real step has been gained towards overcoming the affection; but if the sufferer is told to persist in uttering er, or to sing or roar out his words on all occasions, and trust to these as his infallible remedies, he will probably fail, for the remedies are so much worse than the disease that all sensitive minds would instinctively shun them with horror, and despond the more in consequence.

— Monro (1850)

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Other Examples of Stuttering Humour in Victorian Culture

• Humorous songs such as “The Stuttering Lass”.
• Minor characters in Victorian popular fiction.
• The celebrated theatrical character of Lord Dundreary performed by Edward Sothern. First appearance in the play Our American Cousin (1858). “Dundrearyism” in the periodical press.

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• Anthologized throughout the nineteenth century in numerous anthologies of wit and humor, as well as  recitation manuals.
• In many of its incarnations, the “two stammerers” joke concludes with two people who stammer coming to blows because they each misperceive the other’s stammer as mockery.  

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