Carrion Luggage

Twongue-tisters

Today, I'm sharing an older article from Mental Floss. Usual disclaimer for that site: I don't trust its fact-checking, if indeed it does any.

    The History Behind 8 Famous Tongue Twisters  

And to be honest, I'm not doing a lot of research for something this inherently silly. Just be careful: to use a different but related origin myth, the number of people who think "Ring Around the Rosie" is about the Plague is substantial, even though that claim has been pretty thoroughly debunked. So I'd urge anyone reading this not to spread this around at tailcock parties as Absolute Truth.

Tongue twisters have been screwing up speaking abilities around the world for centuries.

They do have a purpose, though.

As entertaining as tripping over tricky terms can be, early English twisters were also used to teach pupils proper speech.

From what I understand, actors use them to help with enunciation and controlling one's speech. I remember using "red leather, yellow leather" for that. It was surprisingly difficult, even for those with English as a first language.

In a note to teachers in his 1878 book Practical Elocution, J.W. Shoemaker reminded them of the “higher motive” of these confounding sayings: “To The Teacher—While many of the exercises ... may create amusement in a class, a higher motive than 'Amusement' has prompted their insertion. Practice is here afforded in nearly every form of difficult articulation.”

As if there were a higher motive than amusement. Pfeh.

...some of these difficult phrases go way back to when elocution was practiced as routinely as multiplication tables.

Do they even do those in schools anymore?

1. Peter Piper

This might be memory revisionism on my part, but I don't recall that particular twister being very twisty. I just tried it again (my cats heard me, but they already think I'm weird), and it's still not difficult.

What I find interesting isn't the alliteration, but that "piper" is part of the botanical name for pepper. But not the pickled kind. Come to think of it, when's the last time you saw pickled peppers?

Several spice enthusiasts have also suggested the Peter in question was based on 18th-century French horticulturalist Pierre Poivre, though that connection should probably be taken with a grain of salt (or pepper, in this case).

Considering that "poivre" is the translation of "pepper," yeah, I don't know. Again, though, it's the "black pepper" kind, not the "green pepper" kind, which is similar: poivron. Or piment for those degenerates in Québec.

At least it's not as ambiguous as the English word.

2. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?

Oh come on, that's not even a twister; it's more... I don't know, wordplay? The difference in pronunciation between "wood" and "would" is indistinguishable, at least in American English, and tongue-twisters generally rely on similar but different sounds, like "picked a peck of pickled..." And one wonders what was actually meant by "chuck" in "woodchuck." It might very well be the American version of woodcharles.

In 1988, a fish and wildlife technician for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation made national headlines when he posited if a woodchuck could chuck wood (because they actually can’t) it would be able to chuck about 700 pounds of the stuff—but that little detail must not have fit into the linguistic flow of the original rhyme.

Stop making sense of nonsense. Woodchucks (better known as groundhogs, famous for their ability to destroy flower beds, predict weather and cause time loops) may not chuck wood, but one doesn't pick pecks of pickled peppers, either. You pick peppers, then pickle them. Even if you're Peter Piper. But the nonsense is more fun, and we've already established that there is no higher purpose than amusement.

3. and 4. Betty Botter and Two Tooters

I have vague memories of the first one. As for the second, I'm pretty sure we never learned it. Because if we had, we'd have changed it to "Two Hooters."

5. She Sells Seashells

Finally, a legitimate twist-tonguer. At least for me. The code-switching necessary to go from s to sh and back to s is notoriously difficult.

Like, when I was a kid, being trained in how to train a dog, I commanded the dog to shit. The other humans couldn't hide their laughter. The dog, fortunately, interpreted what I meant: sit. I think she was laughing, too. This was, of course, before I developed my potty mouth, and had no clue that "shit" was a 13+ word.

But, just as with anything, you practice until you get it right. Most of the time. Maybe.

6. I Scream, You Scream

Oh for fuck's sake, that's not a tongue-twister; that's a pun. (To be fair, the article acknowledges the lack of twist involved).

7. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

OH COME ON. That's an exercise in spelling, not speaking (this time, I cheated and used copy/paste).

Still, the origin story is interesting, if true. Spoiler: no, it wasn't Mary Poppins. Well, not really. Unless you're a Disney lawyer reading this, in which case it was definitely Mary Poppins and please don't sue me.

8. Pad Kid

Pad kid poured curd pulled cod

I hadn't heard of this one, and it turns out there's a good reason for that.

Not yet as recognizable as some other more traditional rhymes, this short sentence was developed by MIT researchers in 2013 as the world’s trickiest twister.

Worse, it's more nonsensical, and not in a fun way, than the older and more famous ones, which at least follow some semblance of English grammar and syntax. To me, this makes it inferior, even if it was developed at MIT. If you want English grammar and syntax, you'll need to go up the Chuck river to Harvard.

And still, I wonder why they didn't somehow work the word "card" into that one. I guess they're still trying to live down the card-counting story.