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 English, you can express skepticism with the classic saying when pigs fly. In Tagalog, a similar sentiment is expressed with a phrase that translates “when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black,” and there’s a Hungarian phrase that...
Dax in Santa Cruz, California, wonders: Now that we’re into the 21st century, when will people stop saying that initial 20 when referring to a year such as 2028 the way we dropped the 19 in the term 1980s and just started referring to the ’80s? This...
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