International Tongue Twister Day
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“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled Peppers”
The second Sunday in November each year is International Tongue Twister Day, and that’s this coming Sunday, November 9th, so get ready! Who hasn’t tried to trip their tricky tongue attempting tough tongue twisters? Sunday’s the day to give it another try… between football games, maybe.
Tongue twisters are not new. The first published tongue twister was from Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation by John Harris in 1813. However, tricky alliterative phrases existed as a form of amusement and vocal play in oral tradition and folklore long before that. Try reading this one fast...
“Peter Piper, without Pretension to Precocity or Profoundness, Puts Pen to Paper to Produce these Puzzling Pages, Purposely to Please the Palates of Pretty Prattling Playfellows, Proudly Presuming that with Proper Penetration it will Probably, and Perhaps Positively, Prove a Peculiarly Pleasant and Profitable Path to Proper, Plain and Precise Pronunciation. “He Prays Parents to Purchase this Playful Performance, Partly to Pay him for his Patience and Pains; Partly to Provide for the Printers and Publishers; but Principally to Prevent the Pernicious Prevalence of Perverse Pronunciation.”
Some tongue twister facts:
Image credit: redbubble.com
"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck..." originated from a song called "The Woodchuck Song" written by Robert Hobart Davis and Theodore F. Morse, which was featured in the 1903 Broadway musical The Runaways.
Tongue twisters were once used for testing the fit of dentures and for screening applicants for radio or TV positions.
The Hardest tongue twister? According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the toughest tongue twister was:"The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.
Then, "Researchers at MIT, studying speech planning, developed the phrase “Pad kid poured curd pulled cod”. They determined that people often hesitate when trying to say it quickly, rather than blending the similar sounds. It is now considered the toughest phrase to say repeatedly and quickly. I kinda like the sheik’s sick sheep better, though.
In 1968, actor Jack Webb was a guest on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. He took part in a skit where Webb (as Sgt. Joe Friday of Dragnet) grilled Carson about "kleptomaniac Claude Cooper from Cleveland, who copped clean copper clappers kept in a closet."
Yes, languages other than English have tongue twisters. Twisters are universal and appear in nearly every culture and language to help practice pronunciation and diction. Examples can be found in languages such as Czech, Latin, French, German, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese. In Spanish, they’re called trabalenguas, literally 'tongue jammer'. In French, it’s virelangue (tongue twist), and in German, they call them Zungenbrecher, 'tongue breaker'.
Here’s a German zungenbrecher for you that’s pretty easy to translate into English:
Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische; frische Fische fischt Fischers Fritze. (Fisherman Fritz fishes fresh fish; fresh fish fishes Fisherman Fritz)
In sign language, a tongue twister is called a finger-fumbler. According to Susan Fischer, Linguistics Professor, the phrase "Good blood, bad blood" is a tongue twister in English and likewise a finger-fumbler in ASL.
So loosen up your tongue and give it a twist this Sunday. Here’s one from 1899 that’s sure to trip you up.
