We’ve all been there: speaking confidently mid-conversation, making perfect sense… and suddenly your mouth hits a pothole. A word trips, your tongue scrambles, and you produce a sound that can only be described as verbal static. You don’t have a stutter, you’re not panicking, and yet somehow, you’ve just forgotten how to speak like a functioning human being. It’s almost like a broken record, glitching and repeating the same three words ‘you can’t speak’, forcing you to just stand up and simply just walk away from the conversation.
So why does this happen?
Despite how effortless talking feels, speech is a wildly complex process. Every time you speak, your brain is juggling vocabulary, grammar, breathing, timing, tongue placement, and tone — all in milliseconds. It’s basically running a high-speed orchestra, and occasionally, one instrument goes rogue and starts playing jazz. The result: a brief stumble, repetition, or that charming moment where your tongue decides to tie itself into a pretzel.
Often, this happens when our thoughts outrun our words. You know exactly what you want to say, but your speech system hasn’t caught up yet. I guess you can think of it as your brain clicking “next episode” before your mouth finishes the recap. A bit of stress, tiredness, distraction, or multitasking increases the odds — your brain simply misses the last season of your favourite show.
Another surprisingly common cause lies in sheer cognitive overload. If you’re processing too much at once (school assignments, social life, having an existential crisis, etc.) your speech production can momentarily glitch. This doesn’t indicate a disorder — it’s your neural wiring doing its best under pressure and occasionally slipping on a metaphorical banana peel.
It’s also worth remembering that speech requires incredibly fine muscle control – academic reference to my fellow GCSE biologists (the cerebellum). Your tongue, lips, jaw, and vocal cords coordinate like a choreographed dance. One mistimed movement and suddenly you’re auditioning for the role of someone who has said the same vowel 8 times in a row and still hasn’t spat it out.
The good news? This is completely normal. Occasional speech slips happen to even the most eloquent people and it does not mean you secretly have a stutter. True stuttering is persistent, neurological, and typically begins in early childhood. A random linguistic hiccup from time to time is just a glitch in a very sophisticated system — a reminder that your brain is multitasking masterfully 99% of the time.
To minimise these charming verbal trip-ups, slowing down your speech, taking a breath (oxygen is surprisingly useful), and giving your brain a second to organise its thoughts can help. Think of pauses not as awkward silences, but as dramatic intellectual beats. Even Shakespeare paused.
Ultimately, forgetting how to speak for a split second is simply part of being human. Our brains are powerful, but not perfect — and honestly, life would be far less entertaining if we didn’t occasionally sound like we just forgot how language works – it makes your conversations ten times funnier.
To end, I would like to share my favourite line that I use whenever I have this speaking glitch: ‘sorry, English isn’t my first language’. It works every time; people laugh because it is so funny (I have amazing humour) and everyone magically forgets my elocution glitch.
See you next week for a new question and a new answer!
