Heidi from Reno, Nevada, shares a bar game in which players take turns trying to recite by memory the increasingly long concatenation of phrases one fat hen, a couple of ducks, three brown bear, four running hare, five fickle female, six simple Simon, seven Siamese sailors sucking swans, eight egotistical egotists eating eggs, nine nymphating nymphs nibbling on a gnat’s nucleus, and ten Turkish tykes swiftly sailing down the Suwannee River while singing “Auld Lang Syne.” It’s an example of what folklorists call a cumulative tale or a formula tale, the most famous of which include “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” Serving as parlor games since the 1920s, such tales have served as screening tests for radio announcers. Similar sayings with alliterative accumulation include modern versions, such as Ten two-tone ten-ton transcontinental tanker trucks with tandem trailers traveling from Tyler, Texas, to Tallahassee, Tennessee, trucking twelve tanks of Texaco two-test Techroline on twenty-two tires with terrible treads.This is part of a complete episode.
In Hong Kong English, Add oil! means something like “Go on!” or “Go for it!” A recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, this expression of encouragement comes from Cantonese (加油 or gā yáu; rendered as jiāyóu from Mandarin) and draws on the...
A Green Bay Packers fan wonders why a quarterback who’s tackled is said to be sacked. The roots of the word sack as in “bag” goes back thousands of years, all the way to Akkadian, later spreading through Greek, Latin, and then to Romance and...
