Tongue-twister

A tongue-twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken (or sung) word game. Some tongue-twisters produce results that are humorous (or humorously vulgar) when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their amusement value.

Types of tongue-twisters

Tongue-twisters may rely on rapid alternation between similar but distinct phonemes (e.g., s [s] and sh [ʃ]), combining two different alternation patterns,[1] familiar constructs in loanwords, or other features of a spoken language in order to be difficult to articulate. For example, the following sentence was claimed as "the most difficult of common English-language tongue-twisters" by William Poundstone.[2]

The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us.

These deliberately difficult expressions were popular in the 19th century. The popular "she sells seashells" tongue twister was originally published in 1850 as a diction exercise. The term tongue twister was first applied to this kind of expressions in 1895.

"She sells seashells" was turned into a popular song in 1908, with words by British songwriter Terry Sullivan and music by Harry Gifford. According to folk etymology, it was said to be inspired by the life and work of Mary Anning, an early fossil collector.[3] However, Winick was unable to find direct evidence that Anning inspired the tongue-twister nor that Sullivan was aware of this.[4]

She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.
The shells she sells are sea-shells, I'm sure.
For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore
Then I'm sure she sells sea-shore shells.

The most famous tongue twister is Peter Piper

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked

Many tongue-twisters use a combination of alliteration and rhyme. They have two or more sequences of sounds that require repositioning the tongue between syllables, then the same sounds are repeated in a different sequence. An example of this is the song Betty Botter ( listen ):

Betty Botter bought a bit of butter.
The butter Betty Botter bought was a bit bitter
And made her batter bitter.
But a bit of better butter makes better batter.
So Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter
Making Betty Botter's bitter batter better

There are also twisters that make use of compound words and their stems, for example:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck
if a woodchuck would chuck wood.

The catch a lot tongue twister is a great example of what anyone can think of when doing daily activities.

My friend Catchalot in his Cachalot,
Would Catch a lot of other Catchalots,
In their Cachalots,
Who would catch a lot,
Of Cachalots!

The following twister won the "grand prize" in a contest in Games Magazine in 1979:[5]

Shep Schwab shopped at Scott's Schnapps shop;
One shot of Scott's Schnapps stopped Schwab's watch.

Some tongue-twisters take the form of words or short phrases which become tongue-twisters when repeated rapidly (the game is often expressed in the form "Say this phrase three (or five, or ten, etc.) times as fast as you can!"). Some examples include:

  • A Proper Copper Coffee Pot
  • Yellow Lever, Red Lever.
  • The sixth sitting sheet-slitter slit six sheets.
  • Irish Wristwatch, Swiss Wristwatch.
  • Pad kid poured curd pulled cold.[6]
  • Peggy Badcock.

Old Mother Hunt had a rough cut punt
Not a punt cut rough,
But a rough cut punt.

In 2013, a psychologist at an Acoustical Society of America conference claimed that “Pad kid poured curd pulled cod" is the trickiest twister to date.[7]

Shibboleths

Shibboleths, that is, phrases in a language that are difficult for someone who is not a native speaker of that language to say might be regarded as a type of tongue-twist. An example is Georgian baq'aq'i ts'q'alshi q'iq'inebs ("a frog croaks in the water"), in which q' is a uvular ejective. Another example, the Czech and Slovak strč prst skrz krk ("stick a finger through the throat") is difficult for a non-native speaker due to the absence of vowels, although syllabic r is a common sound in Czech, Slovak and some other Slavic languages.

Finger-fumblers

The sign language equivalent of a tongue twister is called a finger-fumbler.[8][9] According to Susan Fischer, the phrase Good blood, bad blood is a tongue-twister in English as well as a finger-fumbler in ASL.[10]

One-syllable article

One-syllable article is a form of Mandarin Chinese tongue twister, written in Classical Chinese. Due to Mandarin Chinese having only four tonal ranges (compared to nine in Cantonese, for example), these works sound like a work of one syllable in different tonal range when spoken in Mandarin, but are far more comprehensible when spoken in another dialect.

Tongue-twisters in creative works
  • In 1951 Danny Kaye recorded a Sylvia Fine song titled "Tongue Twisters".
  • The children's books by Dr. Seuss contain a significant number of tongue-twisters, with Oh Say Can You Say?, and Fox in Socks being the most extreme cases.[11]
  • In the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain, movie star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) uses tongue-twisters, such as Peter Piper, while learning proper diction so he can make the transition from silent films to "talkies" in 1920s Hollywood. He also turns one of them ("Moses supposes his toeses are roses") into a song and dance number along with his best friend Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor).
  • In 1968, Jack Webb guested on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and took part in a parody of Dragnet. The premise was Webb (as Sgt. Joe Friday) grilling Carson about "kleptomaniac Claude Cooper from Cleveland, who copped clean copper clappers kept in a closet." It became one of the most famous sketches in the show's history and was regularly shown on anniversary specials.
  • In the cartoon episode "You Said a Mouseful" from Pinky and the Brain, both Pinky and Brain go through a collage of tongue-twisters that cover almost every category possible.
  • The TV Show BoJack Horseman contains increasingly convoluted tongue-twisters as the show progresses. The lines are often delivered by Princess Caroline, and a notable set involves the actress 'Courtney Portnoy', for example: "How would you enjoy joining Portnoy for a scorched soy porterhouse pork four-courser at Koi?" followed by "Glorify your source, but don’t make it feel forced, of course. And try the borscht!" [12]
  • The party game KAMBA presents illustrated tongue-twisters on cards and challenges players to repeat them faster and faster. Players also pass cards and simultaneously combine tongue twisters with "body twisters" (awkward physical actions) to create entertaining confusion. [13]
  • In the 1991 film Oscar, gangster Snaps Provolone, failed to say a tongue-twister sentence, that not related to his criminal business, saying: "Round the rough and rugged rocks the ragged rascal rudely ran." Conversely, he could say with ease another one, that much related to his business, saying: "Rocco the rum-runner rubbed out Rico the Rat with his Rosco for robbing his rum-running receipts."
gollark: Libraries and stuff, perhaps.
gollark: CC has kind of ended up accidentally following the Unix thing of small simple tools, except often there are at least five copies of simple tools for no reason.
gollark: Yes, I suppose.
gollark: <@202992030685724675> Why would you expect anyone to want a licensed-use CC OS?
gollark: I already have full autocrafting worked out.

See also

References
  1. Speech Science: Tongue Twisters and Valley Girls
  2. Poundstone, William. "The Ultimate". williampoundstone.net. Retrieved 13 March 2010.
  3. Shelley Emmling. "The Fossil Hunter". Retrieved 9 December 2010.
  4. Stephen Winick (26 July 2017). "She Sells Seashells and Mary Anning: Metafolklore with a Twist". Retrieved 29 June 2018.
  5. Contest announced in an issue of November/December 1979; results announced in an issue of March/April 1980
  6. Can You Tackle the World's Trickiest Tongue Twister? by Samantha Grossman, Time magazine, December 5, 2013
  7. Annear, Steve (5 December 2013). "MIT Researchers Say They Have Created The Trickiest Tongue Twister To Date". Boston. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  8. Hanson, Vicki (1991). "Tongue-Twister Effects in the Silent Reading of Hearing and Deaf College Students" (PDF). Journal of Memory and Language. 30 (3): 319–330. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(91)90039-M – via Google Scholar.
  9. Roper, Jonathan (2011). Alliteration in Culture. Springer. p. 8. ISBN 9780230305878.
  10. Aristar, Anthony; Dry, Helen (27 May 1991). "Linguist List, Vol. 2". University of Michigan. Retrieved 13 March 2010.
  11. Philip Nel, "Dr. Seuss: American Icon", 2005, ISBN 0826417086, p.27
  12. Caroline Framke (14 September 2017). "BoJack Horseman is famous for being emotionally wrenching. But it's also ridiculously funny". Vox. Retrieved September 26, 2019.
  13. "KAMBA - tongue twisting table-thumping turmoil".
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