Janine in Murray, Kentucky, shares some favorite tongue twisters. There’s the one that helps you remember the four cardinal directions: Never Eat Sour Wheat. Her dad was fond of saying The stump thunk the skunk stunk and the skunk thunk the stump stunk. There’s also the actors’ warmup All I want is a proper cup of coffee made in a proper copper coffee pot. In French, tongues are tripped up by Cinq ou six sous-officiers se promènent à Soissons, which means “Five or six officers are walking around Soissons,” and in Spanish, Pepe Pecas pica papas con un pico, con un pico pica papas Pepe Pecas translates as “Joe Freckles chops potatoes with a pick, with a pick Joe Freckles chops a potato.” In his 17th-century volume Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae, John Wallis references a tongue twister in a passage that translates to something like: When a twister, a-twisting, will twist him a twist, for the twisting of his twist he three twines doth intwist, but if one of the twists of the twist do I twist, the twine that untwisteth, untwisteth the twist. Many more are in the gorgeously illustrated 1874 collection of tongue twisters called Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation. This is part of a complete episode.
Why do some Spanish speakers use adaptations of certain English terms when there’s already a perfectly good word for the same thing in Spanish? Sometimes the result is called “Spanglish.” For example, Spanish cuentas means “bills,”...
We’ve previously discussed when pigs fly and other idioms expressing profound skepticism that something will occur. That prompted an email from Guillermo in Tucson, Arizona, who shared a Spanish phrase that conveys a similar idea: cuando la...
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