Four Is Not Fourteen: Tongue Twister Patterns and the Unmastery of Language

I vividly recall an early conversation with Professor Dundes in his Kroeber Hall office on the topic that would grow into my 2002 M.A. thesis in folklore and now is revised for this article. We were talking about tongue twisters. Enthusiastic and supportive, Professor Dundes rummaged around his office until he found a huge plastic bag stuffed to overflowing with pieces of paper. This bag turned out to be his "archive" of hand-recorded tongue twisters. "Here," he said as he handed it to me, "I have been collecting these for years, thinking of writing on tongue twisters. Now they are yours. " Most of these examples had come from the folklore collections gathered by students in his wildly popular Introduction to Folklore course, which he had taught from the inception of the folklore program.1The beginnings of tongue twister scholarship can be traced to a late nineteenth-century dispute in the pages of the Journal of American Folklore over the origins of the well-known "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. " Charles Leland (1891:170-71) favored connecting it to the seventeenth-century Benevento priest Peter Pipemus, while William Potts (1892:7476) linked it to popular elocutionist handbooks in which verses of analogous structure were supplied for each letter of the alphabet, e.g., "Andrew Airpump asked his aunt her ailment. ,"2 Since these early examinations of its genealogy-which almost always looked outside the oral tradition-the tongue twister has come to be recognized as a genre of folklore with its most important textual and performative characteristics identified by scholars.In the entry on tongue twisters in The Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, C. F. Potter summarizes these findings. The genre, he notes, is to present a performer with an articulatory challenge, one based on a slight variation in a combination of sounds. Delivery involves, moreover, rapid pace and repetition.3 Potter also discusses the various ways in which tongue twisters have been employed outside their traditional context: by speech pathologists; dentists examining patients with new plates; police officers conducting field sobriety tests; actors and radio announcers working on their enunciation skills4; and people the world over who recommend tongue twisters for a whole range of conditions, from hiccupping to stammering to lisping, and even as a cosmetic curative for mouths deemed too big (1950:1118). It is precisely when juxtaposed with these (more or less) practical uses that traditional tongue twister performance reveals its most distinctive quality.The assumption underlying any secondary or practical application of the genre is that the performer, given sufficient time, effort, and practice, is capable of achieving, or at least approximating, flawless enunciation, thereby conquering the tongue twister's articulatory challenge. On the contrary, folk performances of tongue twisters anticipate, build up to, and inevitably result in the performer's absolute failure to control his/her articulation, to enunciate flawlessly the phrase or word combination.This result is ensured first and foremost by the contractual terms of the traditional tongue twister performance: the given phrase must be pronounced repeatedly and with ever-increasing rapidity. (The latter requirement is "built in," for instance, in the Russian equivalent for "tongue twister," skorogovorka ['rapidtalk'].) Another key performance criterion places no limit on either the number of repetitions or the tempo of delivery. With emphasis on the increasing speed and enunciation, the performer's ultimate enunciative breakdown is guaranteed. The following two tongue twisters exemplify this feature:My father left me, just as he was able,One bowl, one bottle, one ladle,Two bowls, two bottles, two ladles,And so on, as far as you are able in one breath. (Potter1950:1119; emphasis as shown)Clearly, the articulatory task enjoined by this tongue twister has a built-in crisis point: ostensibly increasing ad infinitum, the number of bowls, bottles, and ladles a performer inserts in one breath are limited by his/her lung capacity. …