Pad kid poured curd pulled cod. Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.
Pad kid poured curd pulled cod. Pad kid poured curd pulled cud.
Unlike most of the tongue-twisters I’m going to discuss in this video, that phrase didn’t arise
organically out of a folk tradition, and its provenance isn’t a matter of much debate. It
was developed by a group of researchers at MIT specifically to trip up tongues. That might also
explain why the phrase is basically unintelligible as a sentence. Pad kid…poured curd-pulled cod?
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, and this is The List Show. Today we’re discussing the
stories behind famous tongue-twisters, from the potentially-real Peter Piper
to the disputed identity of the “she” who sells seashells down by, well, you know.
At The Acoustical Society of America’s 166th Meeting, pad kid and his no-doubt
highly viscous curd-pulled cod was deemed the most difficult combination of words for
volunteers to recite. It unofficially dethroned the one-time Guinness World
Record holder for world’s toughest twister: “The sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick.”
Is “pad kid poured curd pulled cod” tougher? Go
ahead and try to repeat it yourself 10 times while the intro plays.
Perhaps the most famous story behind a tongue-twister is, unfortunately,
probably a work of fiction—or perhaps more accurately, what is sometimes
called “metafolklore,” an unsubstantiated folkloric explanation for a piece of folklore.
A lot of sources online will tell you that “she sells seashells on the sea shore” is a nod to
the pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning, who collected fossils along what’s now known
as the Jurassic Coast in southwest England. Anning is definitely worthy of more than a
few lines of commemoration—we discussed some of her exploits in our video about
scientists who didn’t get enough credit in their day. (You can click the link up here
to check that video out, until YouTube inevitably changes its features one day,
at which point I’ll just be pointing up to nothing, like a big weirdo.)
A self-educated woman, Anning collected the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur,
amongst other scientific feats. But she was known to sell fossils, not seashells. And her
sales didn’t take place on the sea shore, per se. Neither of those facts definitively disproves the
purported origin of the tongue-twister (I grew up saying she sells seashells *down by* the seashore,
for example, which gets a little closer to Anning’s situation). But in cases like this,
a complete lack of evidence can often end up being pretty persuasive. And there doesn’t
seem to be any contemporary record tying Anning to the earliest known versions of the famous phrase.
When folklore scholar Stephen Winick looked into the seashore-adjacent seashells for the
Library of Congress’s Folklife blog, the earliest documented connection he found to
Anning dated back to only 1977, decades after a famous song by Terry Sullivan and Harry Gifford
had made use of the phrase. Even then, the book in question only said that Anning is
“reputed to be'' the unnamed seashell seller. That kind of hedging language is often a nice
way to say “someone made this up at some point and then a bunch of people repeated the claim.”
For what it’s worth, Winick also found variations of the phrase that
predate Sullivan and Gifford’s 1908 song, including versions from the
19th century where *he* is selling sea shells. As Winick points out, though,
even if Anning did not inspire the ditty, the fact that this once-relatively-unsung pioneer
is now associated with a famous tongue-twister could be considered a form of poetic justice.
On the subject of entertaining if highly speculative information,
I can tell you that—according to an employee of the New York Department of Environmental
Conservation—a woodchuck could chuck about 700 pounds of wood…if a woodchuck could chuck wood,
of course. Which…they can’t. To be clear, they can’t really chuck much of anything, due to what
futurism.com called their “tiny ineffectual fists.” Absolutely devastating woodburn.
What we can say with a bit more certainty is who popularized the
tongue twister. In the 1903 Broadway musical The Runaways, one song’s chorus wondered,
“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” (It’s
a shame that the Tony Award for Best Original Score was still decades away.)
That song was written by Robert Hobart Davis and Thedoore F. Morse;
Fay Templeton performed it in the show. But while it contributed to the phrase’s spread—as
did a cover of the song recorded by “Ragtime” Bob Roberts—there’s evidence that people were
pondering the hypothetical wood chucking capacity of woodchucks before the musical
debuted. The tongue twister was printed in a 1901 edition of the Pacific Rural Press;
the same year, it was included in The Christian Register’s “Pleasantries” section,
which also included this knee-slapper: “What kind of a noise annoys an oyster? … A noisy
noise annoys an oyster.” Motion to bring back the Pleasantries section to newspapers!
Some tongue-twisters have clearer attribution. A couple can be traced back to the prolific writer
Carolyn Wells, including this one which I am definitely about to nail on the first take:
Betty Botter bought some butter; “But,” said she, “this butter's bitter! If I put it in my batter It
will make my batter bitter. But a bit o' better butter Will but make my batter better.” Then she
bought a bit o’ butter Better than the bitter butter, Made her bitter batter better. So 'twas
better Betty Botter Bought a bit o’ better butter. Wells’s most famous collection was a 1902
publication called A Nonsense Anthology, but I don’t know—compared to pad kid and his pulled cod,
Betty’s situation sounds less like nonsense and more like some sound culinary analysis.
Wells is also credited with this tongue twister about a tooting tutor:
“A tutor who tooted the flute Tried to teach two young tooters to toot. Said the two to the tutor,
“Is it harder to toot, or To tutor two tooters to toot?” I’ve never taught anyone the flute,
but I’m going to say it’s harder to get through this script without losing my mind.
Most people know the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
from the musical film Mary Poppins. That’s definitely not the first time the word was
used, though, and that’s why things got a little supercalifragilisticexpia-litigious
in the middle of the 20th century. The song is attributed to the Sherman brothers,
but songwriters Barney Young and Gloria Parker claimed to have used a nearly identical nonsense
word in “The Super Song” years earlier. They said that Young had made up the word in 1921 and that
they had sent a copy of their tune to Disney in 1951—more than a decade before the studio
released its adaptation of P.L. Travers’s beloved series of books about a magical
nanny who flies on the wind. That synopsis wasn’t really necessary for this discussion,
I just think we all need to remember how odd the Mary Poppins mythology is.
Young and Parker alleged copyright infringement and tried to sue for $12 million. That case was
eventually thrown out because, according to the judge, the word had been in common use
since the 1930s. Sure enough, in a 1931 edition of the Syracuse Daily Orange, a writer named
Helen Herman claims to have coined the very similar supercaliflawjalisticplialadoshus.”
Herman says the word “ … implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb,
wonderful ….” As for what situations would call for her purported coinage, Herman mentions being
asked about how much you liked a certain movie, your opinion of Santa Claus, or what it’s like
working at the school newspaper “ … with none of the superior males here to hinder my reflections.”
OK, we had some debate on the Mental Floss staff as to whether Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
can rightly be considered a tongue-twister, but this next one is a slam dunk: Peter Piper picked
a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper
picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Pepper picked?
His name is Peter Pepper now! That perturbing potpourri of p
sounds first appeared in print back in 1813. The book was actually called Peter Piper's
Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation, though it was credited to
John Harris, and not the eponymous Peter. But the more controversial question is who
might have inspired the tongue-twister in the first place. Many have pointed to Pierre Poivre.
Pierre can be thought of as the French version of Peter, and poivre means pepper in French,
which … raises some questions. #1: Why isn’t my name Pierre Pepper?
More relevant for our purposes, though, how does Poivre, or Pepper, become Piper? Well,
in addition to being a common last name in the UK, Piper is latin for pepper. And
though Poivre wasn’t necessarily known for his pickled peppers, he was a trader who smuggled
cloves from the so-called Spice Islands. Maybe he used some of those cloves in a
pickling brine at some point, but there’s no hard evidence linking Pierre Pepper to Peter Piper.
“I Scream, You Scream, We all Scream for Ice Cream! This is certainly Ice Cream
Weather. Have you a good Ice Cream freezer?” That quotation—including
its decidedly less poetic second half—was used in a 1905 advertisement for a freezer,
not the sweet treat itself. But that’s not the first time someone noticed the sonic overlap
between the words “ice cream” and “I scream.” A number of 19th century wordsmiths were documented
playing around with the spelling and order of those phrases and other related words.
In 1927, a song was written by Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, and Robert King
that popularized the phrase. It became a jazz standard, and eventually worked its way into
Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law, in a charming (if fairly inscrutable) scene set inside a prison.
That’s it for this episode of The List Show. If you have a favorite
tongue-twister we didn’t mention, drop it in the comments below. We’ll see you next time!