February 5, 2009 • 17 mins
If you've ever tried to say "toy boat" three times fast, you'll know that these two words can quickly turn into one tricky tongue twister. But why? Unravel the mysteries of tongue twisters and language in this HowStuffWorks podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot com? Hey, even, welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Hi Josh, Hi Chuck, I'm Chuck,
Big Chuck, Hi Josh. This could arguably be the worst
(00:21):
intro we've ever recorded. Chuck, what do you think? Maybe?
All right, but let's not do it again. No, let's
get raw and fresh baby. Okay, So Chuck, say toy
boat three times fast now, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat,
toy boat, toy boat. That actually at last one, when
you correct yourself, that was pretty good. But the point
is that you can't. You're not supposed to correct yourself.
You want to hear me do it? Yeah, toy boat
to boat. I can't do it. You just went into
(00:43):
Tibet kind of. But Jerry, our producer, actually did it
a few minutes ago when you were out of the
room doing your push ups like you do between podcasts.
It gives me pump Chuck. Yeah, she did it on
the She's the big deal. Jerry does everything perfectly, um,
but most people can't. I've never been enable to say
toy boat three times. It's a tongue twister, it is.
That's exactly right. And did you know, Chuck, that it's
(01:06):
assumed that tongue to tongue see yeah, baby, Uh, tongue
twisters are universal. Yes they are. I did not know
that until we did a little research. All right, So
you you have some from foreign lands. I do I
want to hear something because I don't know any I
found a Chinese one, and there is actually like an
MP three maybe MP four that of this Chinese tongue twister.
(01:28):
I was like, I'm not going to the trouble of
learning that. Well, I will do my best to Japanese
tongue twisters and their translations. So the first one is
uh kiru pioco pioco, me pioco pioco, A wassat pioco pioco,
move pioco pioco. That is a tongue twister. It is, boy,
(01:49):
what does it mean? It translated loosely means take two
sets of three frog croaks, add them together and they
make six frog croaks beautiful like that. And here's another
one's just a word to the wise. It is. It's
word words to the wise. And here's another one from Japan,
it is kono kogi wa hiki nuki nikki kogda, and
(02:12):
that means the nail, this nail is hard to pull out.
Really yeah, wow, so you you can kind of see
how maybe a tongue twister in Japanese doesn't really translate
into a tongue twister, you know, in English. But does
she sells seashells down by the sea shore. That's kind
of silly too, it is, but this nail is hard
to pull out. It's more of like a that's a statement.
(02:34):
You're right, you know, seashells, seashells, sea sells Jesus. Yeah,
the descending in so basically chuck. Um. It's becoming increasingly
apparent that as far as tongue twisters go, I have
what you might call a phonological disorder. You heard of
these I have? Okay, well I'll tell everybody else about it.
You just sit there quietly, okay, Okay. So a phonological
(02:57):
disorder is, basically, um, it's it's any time where you're
developing in such a way that you aren't pronouncing certain phonemes.
And a phoneme if you'll remember correctly when we were,
you know, back in second or third grade, there was
hooked down phonics. Remember hooked down phonics worked for me. Okay,
so instead of a phonic, it's actually called a phoneme technically,
(03:19):
but it's the same thing like buh boy boy. Right.
Those are two phone names, two separate phonemes, and they're
the way we pronounce words, and we learn how to um,
how to pronounce different words, uh, phonetically. That's that's how
we learned to read usually, um, and that's also how
we learn to communicate. Now, if that development doesn't happen properly, Um,
(03:44):
you can end up with a phonological disorder. Is that
a speech impediment? Uh? Yeah, that's another way to put it.
But um, a speech impediment could also include stuttering, which
is not a phonological or yeah, a phonological disorder. Um,
it's actually it's extraneous. But um, this is specifically with
the pronunciation of a phoneme. Right, So let's say you
(04:05):
didn't really get the gust sound. You're gonna have that
apostrophe after the end and an I n G like
nothing something right, And that's actually a sign that you
may have a phonological disorder when you leave them off
at the end, especially or when you substitute one for another, Right,
Sarah Palin, give me an example. Well, that there was
(04:26):
just kind of the common joke was that she never
pronounced anything with the G on the end of it. Yeah,
but I think that was just more colloquial. I think
so too, And I think it was very very well
studied colloquialism. Indeed, yea, so um that the so the
phonological disorder thing, apparently anywhere from seven to ten percent
of five year olds have one. Yeah, and uh, it
(04:48):
can it can be really you know, like leaving the
G off the end of a word. Uh, he's kind
of mild. Um or it can be incredibly severe where
no one understands the word you're saying, including your family. Right,
Like you just you're essentially not making sense even though
you know what you want to say. You're just you.
(05:09):
No one can understand you. So therefore what's the point
of communicating? Right, So that's severe, not like when you
hear like a little kid say my shoulder holts. Yeah.
Well actually that's part of development too. That's that that's
either either they have a phonological disorder or they're still
working out the kinks or their shoulder holts. Yeah, exactly, so. Um,
and there's two there's two causes for phonological disorders right, well,
(05:31):
actually there's three. The third one is just beyond cryptic.
The first one is structural, right where your your brain
isn't structurally developed in the normal way, and therefore there's
there's something missing. Um, there's some neurons aren't connected. There's
there's something that's that's structurally different about your brain that's
(05:52):
going to keep you from being able to say certain phonemes.
The other is neurological, where you're you're nervous system is
and finally tuned quite enough to be able to really
get the real polished phonemes, like like a z H
sound or something like that, so you'd have trouble speaking French.
I would say, probably uh. And the third one just
(06:14):
scares me. It's um uh, it's a phonological disorder of
indeterminate origin. Basically we have no idea, okay, And the
reason we have no idea is because we aren't entirely
certain how we speak, how we hear, how we speak.
We don't know. Did you know that I did not
(06:36):
know that we'll give me something you got Well, I
thought you were going to talk about the tongue. Oh yeah,
we'll get to the tongue. Is now a good time?
I think that was a great time. Well, the tongue
is actually, as everyone knows, very important to your speech,
uh and taste and taste. Obviously, the tongue is connected
to the base of your mouth by a piece of tissue,
(06:57):
A vertical piece of tissue. Yeah, what's it called? Everyone
wants to know that, and now we know it's that's
called the lingual uh franulum? Is that how you would
pronounce it? I know we constantly butcher pronunciations that feel bad.
The lingual framulum. That's what I went with. Okay, I
like that, and that's what the little thing is called. Um.
If yours is too short, uh, you you may get
(07:18):
a speech impediment because of that, because your tongue has
to have a certain amount of movement, right to be
able to carry out to produce these phonemes, right, right,
But you can have it corrected. They're actually surgeries. Still
a little bit of snipe, A little snip here and there.
Might as well talk about putting bamboo shoots under your
fingernails when I think of like snipping the lingual formulum. Yeah,
(07:38):
that's bad. Uh. So, Yeah, the tongue has a lot
to do with how you pronounce things, and so has
everything to do with So if you have a problem
with the frenulum there, then you're gonna have some issues
with your speech. And I imagine there's probably an opposite
disorder to where you're maybe lacking a lingual framulum and
your tongue just kind of lalls around in your mouth. Interesting,
maybe you have like a very little control over it.
(08:01):
I would think that would produce a speech impediment as well.
But you just made that up, right, I did. But
you know that somebody somewhere out there has that problem,
and if you do, send us an email. Thanks for
tuning in. So okay, chuckers, Um, you want to get
back to the brain part, uh, because really, your tongue
(08:22):
is not doing anything on its own. It's obeying your brain,
all right. So it all comes back to the brain essentially,
doesn't It always does. Um. So there's this guy who
in the nineteen sixties, his name is al Lieberman. I
think he was a yalely um, and he came up
with this thing called the motor theory of speech perception, Okay,
And basically this theory said that to produce speech, we
(08:45):
used the same areas of the brain that we that
we used to hear to listen, right, So it's like
a mimicking type of thing. It's basically what this guy's
point was is that when we hear something, we hear
it like we're speaking it. Right, maybe we cut it
into phone emes um, but it's it's basically the reverse process,
(09:08):
which actually a lot of people bought into for for
many many years, and then it kind of fell out
of favor in the eighties, right right. But then almost
as soon as it fell out of favor favor, some
some studies started coming around that actually supported it, and
now it's gaining strength again, especially since the evan of
the m R. I. But you want to tell them
about that study that really kind of suggests that we
(09:31):
do here the same way we speak, the Haber and
Haber study. As I can't figure out their brother and sister,
I seen they're probably husband and wife. Yeah, Yeah, they
did some research, and what what they did was they
got some college aged subjects and had them and silently
read sentences that had tongue twisters, right, and then they
(09:52):
also had them a control group who uh, I'm sorry.
The control group was a different sentence that did not
have a tongue to us, just a regular sentence. Right.
So they found out that it took longer to read
to silently read the tongue twisters than it did for
the sentences that that did not contain them. Right. And
these are all fully developed um college age test subjects,
(10:15):
And so if if we aren't using the same process
in reverse, we shouldn't have any trouble silently reading a
tongue twister. But it suggests that we we read by
breaking things up into phonemes, just like we do when
we're speaking, right, which would suggest that the motor theory
of speech uh is correct? Right, which I agree with
(10:37):
because I looked up some some cool tongue twisters and
I have to read them slower in my head than
I just like I would when I say him right,
like what? Well, Uh, there's one. I believe it's the
Guinness holds a Guinness Record for being and I can
barely get through this one for being the most difficult
tongue twister, and that is how do you quantify that
(10:58):
world record? Well, we'll have to ask in us about that.
It is the sixth six sheets, six sheeps sick. I
can hardly get through that. So the six six I
can't even say it, can I try? Yeah, it's it's
at the top there. Okay, So the six six sheics,
six sheeps sick man, that's pretty good. Thank you. I
(11:22):
just overcame the world record holder for toughest tongue twister.
That's impressive. Yeah, thanks a lot. And there's also something
called spoonerisms. Did you look into that? Uh. Spoonerism is
when there's a transposition of it's usually an initial sound
of two or more words. So for instance, tons of
soil versus sons of toil, that's a spoonerism. And it's
(11:45):
and it's actually a lot of times are designed. People
make up a spoonerism that will get you to say
a curse word by accident, like I U p h No,
not exactly. More like, I'm not a pheasant plucker. I'm
the pheasant plucker's mate, and I'm only plucking pheasants because
the pheasant plucker is late. So if someone I got
to that fast enough, they might accidentally say a bad word. Yeah,
(12:09):
we have to try that later once it's you know, off,
the recording button is off. And interesting, they also found
out there they're also sign language uh twisters, and they
called us finger fumblers. I wow, how about that. I
didn't tell you that one. So that's a that's a
sign language spoonerism, a sign language a tongue twister. And
(12:29):
I did not find any. I tried to research and
find some. So if anyone out there knows of any
sign language finger fumblers, we'd love to hear about it. Well,
that's pretty interesting. Um. Actually that kind of leads us
back to the whole toy boat thing. Um, As it
turns out like there's no definitive answer for why it's
tough for us to say toy boat right, whether it's
it's physical like the tongue can't move fast enough. You
(12:51):
just said it funny in saying it. Yeah, I'm from
Ohio and sometimes you can hear that every once in
a while. Um, and uh, So we don't know if
it's if it's physical, like the tongues just incapable. Like
we found a couple of phonemes that we can string together,
that the tongue doesn't move fast enough to say it
three times fast, or if it's a brain glitch, right,
(13:12):
if we if there are finger what are they calling
finger fumbler? Finger fumblers even though you're producing language, you're
moving your fingers, So I would imagine you're using a
different region of the brain for that, or maybe an
additional region of the brain. So, uh, yeah, we don't.
We can't say for certain whether it's the brain or
(13:32):
the tongue that's responsible. It could be the tongue. Think
about it, toy boat right, um, the going from the
oi like the tongue is at the bottom of your mouth.
To boat your your tongue has to go back up
and kind of click on the sides along your molars. True,
that may be just something that it can't do very quickly,
(13:55):
or it could be you know, your your motor system
in your in your rain is not working correctly. Right.
These things really frustrate me. Um. I don't know if
it's a little kid in me from class coming out,
but any anything like this or anytime someone uh you know,
the rub your stomach and pat your head or any
of those physical things with them basically where you trick
(14:15):
your brain. I hate those. Yeah, it reduces me too.
I feel like you know to like the single cell organism.
I just can't work it out. Well, don't feel too bad, Chuck,
because I have one fast fact for you that I
think you're gonna feel better about. The average speaker only
makes about one error for every thousand words spoken. Really,
(14:36):
and I would say you're above average, So don't feel
too bad that I have more or below average? Below average? Well,
there's my one, right. Yeah. I think if you counted
out the mistakes that I make in a podcast, that
would be much higher than that. But I think that's
a little different than normal speaking conversation. I feel the pressure. Well,
if you guys out there want to see the word
(14:56):
lingual a frenulum and by word, of course, I mean words,
there's two for me. Um. You can type in why
can't you say toy boat in our search bar at
how stuff works dot com. But first before we let
you go to me where yet? Because we have listener mail, Yes, Josh,
we have listener mail. Yes, this was just one piece
(15:19):
of mail from our fan Lila Feldman, and Lila's writing
in about our what to Do with the Dead body episode. Yeah.
I love that she does too, but she had a
little bit of a problem with it. And so we're
gonna read this because I don't want people to think
we just cherry pick, you know, the kudos to ourselves. No,
definitely don't. So she writes in and says that I
was a little disappointed with a recent podcast because you
(15:39):
didn't mention some older and more traditional ways of burial
that can be considered green, which is a very good point.
For instance, Jewish burial, traditionally someone was just wrapped in
a shroud and put in the ground, and then that
eventually evolved to a pine box. But that would have
been an old school way to have a green burial
traditional Jewish Paris. It makes sense, does And another method
(16:02):
which no one uses nowadays, uh, that's popular in Roman
times still around the Turkish Empire, is to just bury
the body as is in the ground, wait for the
flesh and decomposed, and then dig out the bones. And
then you usually put those bones in the catacombs and
or taken with the family when they were trying to
like escape a tyrant or go on vacation, even they
(16:22):
would kick these bones or works really good for a
nice souper, yeah, a nice consumm Yeah. So that was
from Laila Feldman, and we appreciate Laila writing in. And
I'm sure there were all sorts of ancient ways of
dealing with dead bodies that we failed to consider. So
we we kind of had a modern take on it.
But right we just get so frantically caught up in
the green movement thing. You know, we just keep looking forward,
(16:44):
looking forward, right backward. There's a lot of answers if
you look back, and if you'd like to take Chuck
and Eyed a task in a very puritanical manner, you
can send an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M HM
(17:07):
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot com? Hey, even, welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Hi Josh, Hi Chuck, I'm Chuck,
Big Chuck, Hi Josh. This could arguably be the worst
(00:21):
intro we've ever recorded. Chuck, what do you think? Maybe?
All right, but let's not do it again. No, let's
get raw and fresh baby. Okay, So Chuck, say toy
boat three times fast now, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat,
toy boat, toy boat. That actually at last one, when
you correct yourself, that was pretty good. But the point
is that you can't. You're not supposed to correct yourself.
You want to hear me do it? Yeah, toy boat
to boat. I can't do it. You just went into
(00:43):
Tibet kind of. But Jerry, our producer, actually did it
a few minutes ago when you were out of the
room doing your push ups like you do between podcasts.
It gives me pump Chuck. Yeah, she did it on
the She's the big deal. Jerry does everything perfectly, um,
but most people can't. I've never been enable to say
toy boat three times. It's a tongue twister, it is.
That's exactly right. And did you know, Chuck, that it's
(01:06):
assumed that tongue to tongue see yeah, baby, Uh, tongue
twisters are universal. Yes they are. I did not know
that until we did a little research. All right, So
you you have some from foreign lands. I do I
want to hear something because I don't know any I
found a Chinese one, and there is actually like an
MP three maybe MP four that of this Chinese tongue twister.
(01:28):
I was like, I'm not going to the trouble of
learning that. Well, I will do my best to Japanese
tongue twisters and their translations. So the first one is
uh kiru pioco pioco, me pioco pioco, A wassat pioco pioco,
move pioco pioco. That is a tongue twister. It is, boy,
(01:49):
what does it mean? It translated loosely means take two
sets of three frog croaks, add them together and they
make six frog croaks beautiful like that. And here's another
one's just a word to the wise. It is. It's
word words to the wise. And here's another one from Japan,
it is kono kogi wa hiki nuki nikki kogda, and
(02:12):
that means the nail, this nail is hard to pull out.
Really yeah, wow, so you you can kind of see
how maybe a tongue twister in Japanese doesn't really translate
into a tongue twister, you know, in English. But does
she sells seashells down by the sea shore. That's kind
of silly too, it is, but this nail is hard
to pull out. It's more of like a that's a statement.
(02:34):
You're right, you know, seashells, seashells, sea sells Jesus. Yeah,
the descending in so basically chuck. Um. It's becoming increasingly
apparent that as far as tongue twisters go, I have
what you might call a phonological disorder. You heard of
these I have? Okay, well I'll tell everybody else about it.
You just sit there quietly, okay, Okay. So a phonological
(02:57):
disorder is, basically, um, it's it's any time where you're
developing in such a way that you aren't pronouncing certain phonemes.
And a phoneme if you'll remember correctly when we were,
you know, back in second or third grade, there was
hooked down phonics. Remember hooked down phonics worked for me. Okay,
so instead of a phonic, it's actually called a phoneme technically,
(03:19):
but it's the same thing like buh boy boy. Right.
Those are two phone names, two separate phonemes, and they're
the way we pronounce words, and we learn how to um,
how to pronounce different words, uh, phonetically. That's that's how
we learned to read usually, um, and that's also how
we learn to communicate. Now, if that development doesn't happen properly, Um,
(03:44):
you can end up with a phonological disorder. Is that
a speech impediment? Uh? Yeah, that's another way to put it.
But um, a speech impediment could also include stuttering, which
is not a phonological or yeah, a phonological disorder. Um,
it's actually it's extraneous. But um, this is specifically with
the pronunciation of a phoneme. Right, So let's say you
(04:05):
didn't really get the gust sound. You're gonna have that
apostrophe after the end and an I n G like
nothing something right, And that's actually a sign that you
may have a phonological disorder when you leave them off
at the end, especially or when you substitute one for another, Right,
Sarah Palin, give me an example. Well, that there was
(04:26):
just kind of the common joke was that she never
pronounced anything with the G on the end of it. Yeah,
but I think that was just more colloquial. I think
so too, And I think it was very very well
studied colloquialism. Indeed, yea, so um that the so the
phonological disorder thing, apparently anywhere from seven to ten percent
of five year olds have one. Yeah, and uh, it
(04:48):
can it can be really you know, like leaving the
G off the end of a word. Uh, he's kind
of mild. Um or it can be incredibly severe where
no one understands the word you're saying, including your family. Right,
Like you just you're essentially not making sense even though
you know what you want to say. You're just you.
(05:09):
No one can understand you. So therefore what's the point
of communicating? Right, So that's severe, not like when you
hear like a little kid say my shoulder holts. Yeah.
Well actually that's part of development too. That's that that's
either either they have a phonological disorder or they're still
working out the kinks or their shoulder holts. Yeah, exactly, so. Um,
and there's two there's two causes for phonological disorders right, well,
(05:31):
actually there's three. The third one is just beyond cryptic.
The first one is structural, right where your your brain
isn't structurally developed in the normal way, and therefore there's
there's something missing. Um, there's some neurons aren't connected. There's
there's something that's that's structurally different about your brain that's
(05:52):
going to keep you from being able to say certain phonemes.
The other is neurological, where you're you're nervous system is
and finally tuned quite enough to be able to really
get the real polished phonemes, like like a z H
sound or something like that, so you'd have trouble speaking French.
I would say, probably uh. And the third one just
(06:14):
scares me. It's um uh, it's a phonological disorder of
indeterminate origin. Basically we have no idea, okay, And the
reason we have no idea is because we aren't entirely
certain how we speak, how we hear, how we speak.
We don't know. Did you know that I did not
(06:36):
know that we'll give me something you got Well, I
thought you were going to talk about the tongue. Oh yeah,
we'll get to the tongue. Is now a good time?
I think that was a great time. Well, the tongue
is actually, as everyone knows, very important to your speech,
uh and taste and taste. Obviously, the tongue is connected
to the base of your mouth by a piece of tissue,
(06:57):
A vertical piece of tissue. Yeah, what's it called? Everyone
wants to know that, and now we know it's that's
called the lingual uh franulum? Is that how you would
pronounce it? I know we constantly butcher pronunciations that feel bad.
The lingual framulum. That's what I went with. Okay, I
like that, and that's what the little thing is called. Um.
If yours is too short, uh, you you may get
(07:18):
a speech impediment because of that, because your tongue has
to have a certain amount of movement, right to be
able to carry out to produce these phonemes, right, right,
But you can have it corrected. They're actually surgeries. Still
a little bit of snipe, A little snip here and there.
Might as well talk about putting bamboo shoots under your
fingernails when I think of like snipping the lingual formulum. Yeah,
(07:38):
that's bad. Uh. So, Yeah, the tongue has a lot
to do with how you pronounce things, and so has
everything to do with So if you have a problem
with the frenulum there, then you're gonna have some issues
with your speech. And I imagine there's probably an opposite
disorder to where you're maybe lacking a lingual framulum and
your tongue just kind of lalls around in your mouth. Interesting,
maybe you have like a very little control over it.
(08:01):
I would think that would produce a speech impediment as well.
But you just made that up, right, I did. But
you know that somebody somewhere out there has that problem,
and if you do, send us an email. Thanks for
tuning in. So okay, chuckers, Um, you want to get
back to the brain part, uh, because really, your tongue
(08:22):
is not doing anything on its own. It's obeying your brain,
all right. So it all comes back to the brain essentially,
doesn't It always does. Um. So there's this guy who
in the nineteen sixties, his name is al Lieberman. I
think he was a yalely um, and he came up
with this thing called the motor theory of speech perception, Okay,
And basically this theory said that to produce speech, we
(08:45):
used the same areas of the brain that we that
we used to hear to listen, right, So it's like
a mimicking type of thing. It's basically what this guy's
point was is that when we hear something, we hear
it like we're speaking it. Right, maybe we cut it
into phone emes um, but it's it's basically the reverse process,
(09:08):
which actually a lot of people bought into for for
many many years, and then it kind of fell out
of favor in the eighties, right right. But then almost
as soon as it fell out of favor favor, some
some studies started coming around that actually supported it, and
now it's gaining strength again, especially since the evan of
the m R. I. But you want to tell them
about that study that really kind of suggests that we
(09:31):
do here the same way we speak, the Haber and
Haber study. As I can't figure out their brother and sister,
I seen they're probably husband and wife. Yeah, Yeah, they
did some research, and what what they did was they
got some college aged subjects and had them and silently
read sentences that had tongue twisters, right, and then they
(09:52):
also had them a control group who uh, I'm sorry.
The control group was a different sentence that did not
have a tongue to us, just a regular sentence. Right.
So they found out that it took longer to read
to silently read the tongue twisters than it did for
the sentences that that did not contain them. Right. And
these are all fully developed um college age test subjects,
(10:15):
And so if if we aren't using the same process
in reverse, we shouldn't have any trouble silently reading a
tongue twister. But it suggests that we we read by
breaking things up into phonemes, just like we do when
we're speaking, right, which would suggest that the motor theory
of speech uh is correct? Right, which I agree with
(10:37):
because I looked up some some cool tongue twisters and
I have to read them slower in my head than
I just like I would when I say him right,
like what? Well, Uh, there's one. I believe it's the
Guinness holds a Guinness Record for being and I can
barely get through this one for being the most difficult
tongue twister, and that is how do you quantify that
(10:58):
world record? Well, we'll have to ask in us about that.
It is the sixth six sheets, six sheeps sick. I
can hardly get through that. So the six six I
can't even say it, can I try? Yeah, it's it's
at the top there. Okay, So the six six sheics,
six sheeps sick man, that's pretty good. Thank you. I
(11:22):
just overcame the world record holder for toughest tongue twister.
That's impressive. Yeah, thanks a lot. And there's also something
called spoonerisms. Did you look into that? Uh. Spoonerism is
when there's a transposition of it's usually an initial sound
of two or more words. So for instance, tons of
soil versus sons of toil, that's a spoonerism. And it's
(11:45):
and it's actually a lot of times are designed. People
make up a spoonerism that will get you to say
a curse word by accident, like I U p h No,
not exactly. More like, I'm not a pheasant plucker. I'm
the pheasant plucker's mate, and I'm only plucking pheasants because
the pheasant plucker is late. So if someone I got
to that fast enough, they might accidentally say a bad word. Yeah,
(12:09):
we have to try that later once it's you know, off,
the recording button is off. And interesting, they also found
out there they're also sign language uh twisters, and they
called us finger fumblers. I wow, how about that. I
didn't tell you that one. So that's a that's a
sign language spoonerism, a sign language a tongue twister. And
(12:29):
I did not find any. I tried to research and
find some. So if anyone out there knows of any
sign language finger fumblers, we'd love to hear about it. Well,
that's pretty interesting. Um. Actually that kind of leads us
back to the whole toy boat thing. Um, As it
turns out like there's no definitive answer for why it's
tough for us to say toy boat right, whether it's
it's physical like the tongue can't move fast enough. You
(12:51):
just said it funny in saying it. Yeah, I'm from
Ohio and sometimes you can hear that every once in
a while. Um, and uh, So we don't know if
it's if it's physical, like the tongues just incapable. Like
we found a couple of phonemes that we can string together,
that the tongue doesn't move fast enough to say it
three times fast, or if it's a brain glitch, right,
(13:12):
if we if there are finger what are they calling
finger fumbler? Finger fumblers even though you're producing language, you're
moving your fingers, So I would imagine you're using a
different region of the brain for that, or maybe an
additional region of the brain. So, uh, yeah, we don't.
We can't say for certain whether it's the brain or
(13:32):
the tongue that's responsible. It could be the tongue. Think
about it, toy boat right, um, the going from the
oi like the tongue is at the bottom of your mouth.
To boat your your tongue has to go back up
and kind of click on the sides along your molars. True,
that may be just something that it can't do very quickly,
(13:55):
or it could be you know, your your motor system
in your in your rain is not working correctly. Right.
These things really frustrate me. Um. I don't know if
it's a little kid in me from class coming out,
but any anything like this or anytime someone uh you know,
the rub your stomach and pat your head or any
of those physical things with them basically where you trick
(14:15):
your brain. I hate those. Yeah, it reduces me too.
I feel like you know to like the single cell organism.
I just can't work it out. Well, don't feel too bad, Chuck,
because I have one fast fact for you that I
think you're gonna feel better about. The average speaker only
makes about one error for every thousand words spoken. Really,
(14:36):
and I would say you're above average, So don't feel
too bad that I have more or below average? Below average? Well,
there's my one, right. Yeah. I think if you counted
out the mistakes that I make in a podcast, that
would be much higher than that. But I think that's
a little different than normal speaking conversation. I feel the pressure. Well,
if you guys out there want to see the word
(14:56):
lingual a frenulum and by word, of course, I mean words,
there's two for me. Um. You can type in why
can't you say toy boat in our search bar at
how stuff works dot com. But first before we let
you go to me where yet? Because we have listener mail, Yes, Josh,
we have listener mail. Yes, this was just one piece
(15:19):
of mail from our fan Lila Feldman, and Lila's writing
in about our what to Do with the Dead body episode. Yeah.
I love that she does too, but she had a
little bit of a problem with it. And so we're
gonna read this because I don't want people to think
we just cherry pick, you know, the kudos to ourselves. No,
definitely don't. So she writes in and says that I
was a little disappointed with a recent podcast because you
(15:39):
didn't mention some older and more traditional ways of burial
that can be considered green, which is a very good point.
For instance, Jewish burial, traditionally someone was just wrapped in
a shroud and put in the ground, and then that
eventually evolved to a pine box. But that would have
been an old school way to have a green burial
traditional Jewish Paris. It makes sense, does And another method
(16:02):
which no one uses nowadays, uh, that's popular in Roman
times still around the Turkish Empire, is to just bury
the body as is in the ground, wait for the
flesh and decomposed, and then dig out the bones. And
then you usually put those bones in the catacombs and
or taken with the family when they were trying to
like escape a tyrant or go on vacation, even they
(16:22):
would kick these bones or works really good for a
nice souper, yeah, a nice consumm Yeah. So that was
from Laila Feldman, and we appreciate Laila writing in. And
I'm sure there were all sorts of ancient ways of
dealing with dead bodies that we failed to consider. So
we we kind of had a modern take on it.
But right we just get so frantically caught up in
the green movement thing. You know, we just keep looking forward,
(16:44):
looking forward, right backward. There's a lot of answers if
you look back, and if you'd like to take Chuck
and Eyed a task in a very puritanical manner, you
can send an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M HM
(17:07):
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Josh Clark
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