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 is the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
Back in the forties Danny Kaye, the comedian, actor and singer, brought out a recording called Tongue Twisters. Though he mentions the well-known Peter Piper twister he doesn't actually sing it. The lines of the song basically scoff that Peter Piper is too easy, so Kaye instead speeds through several other tongue-twisters without missing a beat.
Tongue-twisters have been part of poetry for centuries, partly because alliteration (the use of the same letter or sound over and over within one or two lines of a poem) was a very common part of early English poetry. Alliteration was later frowned upon by "better" poets, but in fact turns up in many well-known poems, such as
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
The fair breeze blew, the white foam, flew,
The furrow followed free.
Or in Swinburne's rather less well-known, "Nephelidia" (in which he parodies his own rather overblown style):
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous moonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float.
Tongue-twisters became so popular in the 19th century that whole books of them were published, one of which, Macaronic Poetry, included the following piece of nonsense by Dr Wallace of Oxford:
When a twister a twisting, will twist him a twist:
For the twisting a twist, he three twines will entwist,
But if one of the twines of the twist do untwist,
The twine that untwisteth, untwisteth the twist.
And W S Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, included several tongue-twisters in his opera libretti, such as:
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!
Iona and Peter Opie collected dozens of tongue-twisters, including the following:
Your Bob owes our Bob a bob. If your Bob doesn't give our Bob the bob your Bob owes our bob, our Bob will give your Bob a bob in the eye.
There's no need to light a night-light
On a light night like tonight,
For a night-light's a slight light
On a night like tonight.
How many cans can a cannibal nibble
If a cannibal can nibble cans?
As many cans as a cannibal would nibble
If a cannibal could nibble cans.
Many readers will have heard the line, The Leith Police dismisseth us, which was supposedly used to test how sober someone was. Few of would pass the test, sober or not, but what if we had to say the whole verse?
The Leith police dismisseth us,
I'm thankful, sir, to say;
The Leith police dismisseth us,
They thought we sought to stay.
The Leith police dismisseth us,
We both sighed sighs apiece,
And the sigh that we sighed as we said goodbye
Was the size of the Leith police.
Finally, here are some one-line twisters. See how many you can manage!
- What noise annoys a noisy oyster? A noisy noise annoys a noisy oyster.
- A proper cup of coffee from a proper coffee pot.
- 'Are you copper-bottoming "em, my man?" 'No, I'm aluminiuming "em, Mum!"
- She was a thistle sifter and sifted thistles through a thistle sieve.
- The sixth sheikh's sixth sheep's sick.
And just to prove that tongue-twisters don't have to be long, try this:
Lemon liniment.
