Erratic rackets will get you in a terrible twist
Like many men who play tennis, when i hit a ball into the net i tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when i myself have been trying so hard.
The other day, i threw a further insult in its direction. ‘An erratic racket!’ i said. Then i tried to repeat it. ‘An erracit rattik!’ And again. ‘An erracit rattik!’ it was at this very moment that i realised i had just invented a brand new tongue-twister.
After the game was over, i bet each of the three other players £5 that they could not say ‘An erratic racket’ very fast five times in a row. Two of t hem went wrong on the second erratic racket, and t he t hird went wrong on t he f ourth. My money was safe, and a classic new tonguetwister was born, every bit as tricky as ‘Red lorry, yellow lorry’, and rather more classy.
One of my f ellow players pointed out that ‘An erratic racket’ was itself a variation on ‘ cricket critic’, so i suggested combining the two to create ‘A cricket critic with an erratic racket’, and entering this great new tonguetwister into the World TongueTwisting Championship, which no doubt takes place in Aberyswyth, or perhaps, in a particularly tough year, in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
i suppose that the first tonguetwister i ever learnt was ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper’, followed closely by the wittier ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?’, which comes with the non-committal answer: ‘A woodchuck would chuck all the would he could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.’
Needless to say, an American pedant once worked out an accurate answer to the great woodchuck question, calculating that, if a woodchuck could chuck wood, then a woodchuck could chuck about 700 pounds of wood, if it was chucking very hard. So now you know.
With an erracit rattik still ringing in my ears, i tried it out on a couple of children, with equal success. i had half-imagined that, in these days of computer games, the tongue-twisting tradition might have died out among the younger generation, but not a bit of it: both of them tried plenty of their own tongue-twisters on me, some old, some new.
i found ‘A proper cup of coffee from a proper copper coffee pot’ particularly troublesome. i sailed through the first section — ‘A proper cup of coffee from a . . .’ with ease, but, alas, fell over head-first on the second — ‘a popper cropper poffee cot’.
A new favourite among children seems to be ‘ ken Dodd’s dad’s dog’s dead’, which presumably also has the merit, after all these years, of being true. (incidentally, i know a second j oke, this one not a tongue-twister, concerning ken Dodd, though it requires a certain amount of knowledge about his act. When you meet someone in a public place, you should say, ‘ken Dodd came here yesterday’, to which they invariably reply, ‘ Did he?’, and to which you then exclaim: ‘No — Doddy!’ in my experience, it works every time.) Some tongue-twisters contain additional boobytraps, so that the ol d words re - emerge as proper new words, giving the original sentence an entirely new meaning. My favourite of these is ‘One smart feller, he felt smart’. i won’t repeat here what happens to it once it has been t ongue - t wisted, but i can guarantee the new sentence will produce howls of uncontrolled laughter, particularly if you happen to be a little boy under the age of seven. One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun. So when you say, or at least try to say, ‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore’ or ‘Of all the felt i ever felt, i never felt a piece of felt which felt the same as that felt felt, when i first felt the felt of that felt hat’, there is something pleasing in its nonutilitarianism — itself a modest one-word tongue-twister.
it is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril. American newscasters are said to dread having to get through the phrase ‘ Former New York City Mayor Rudi Giuliani’, whilst here in Britain, our very own James Naughtie lived up to his surname when he stumbled over those fatal words ‘Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’.
THe only tongue-twister that has ever served any real purpose is ‘The Leith police dismisseth us’, which is said to be the phrase police ask suspects to repeat so as to prove they are not drunk.
in the P.G. Wodehouse novel Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit, Bertie Wooster gets Jeeves to repeat ‘ Theodore Oswaldthistle, the thistle sifter, sifting a sack of thistles thrust three thorns through the thick of his thumb’ for the same reason.
Needless to say, Jeeves passes the test with flying colours, and ‘an intonation as clear as a bell, if not clearer’. But would even Jeeves fare quite so well with ‘A cricket critic with an erratic racket’?