George

The oldest child of my oldest friend did not start talking at the expected time.  I only saw him very occasionally. Eventually he found one word, for his bottle of what seemed to me over-sweetened drink, which he said as OCHIWAA. My friend’s wife had a very sweet tooth. At three and a half, George still had OCHIWAA as his only word.

I heard that he had a brief period of speech and language therapy. I don’t know how regular or intense this was. But very gradually, words started to be combined. My old friend and his family moved abroad for a while. And I wasn’t in close enough touch to know what George’s teachers thought and said about his speech and language. But I did hear that when he was doing his second degree (in Britain), his course director commented on his ‘communication problem’.

He graduated, and went to work in a very highly competitive industry. He did quite exceptionally well.

In his speech and language, there is no longer any trace that I can detect of his earlier problems. His only issue, as far as I am aware, is that he is not good at judging the effect of his words on others, a weakness of which he is well aware.

Professionally, I have never had contact over this amount of time, a little over 40 years. I tell George’s story because it illustrates the long natural history of speech and language disorders, known from various studies.