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.
According to Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Bookshop|Amazon) by Ben Yagoda, the word smarmy, meaning “unctuous” or “ingratiating,” may come from a 19th-century magazine contest, in which readers sent in...
Mary Beth in Greenville, South Carolina, wonders: Why do we say four-oh-nine for the number 409 instead of four-zero-nine or four-aught-nine? What are the rules for saying either zero or oh or aught or ought to indicate that arithmetical symbol...
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