Sometimes, to really understand something that you think
you’ve known all your life, you need to look at it from the point of view of
another viewpoint.
I am speaking, of course, of tongue twisters.
First of all, do tongue twisters really twist your tongue? I
don’t remember my tongue ever accidentally curling into a triple pronged
clover, or whatever you call that cool trick, during an attempt to describe
where She sells her seashells.
Second of all, let's look at the sentences themselves. After
failing to find the equivalent of “tongue twister” in Portuguese, I settled on
calling them senseless sentences, because that’s what they really are. Don’t
let them fool you. How do you pick a pepper that’s already pickled? Or is Peter
Piper not actually in his garden picking peppers, but in the grocery store, picking
out which brand he wants? Does he want sweet and sour, or a jar of wickles?
These Sensless Sentences are tricky, too. For almost two
decades, I imagined a woodchuck gnawing on wood, seeing how many logs he could
get through. Only when I was in front of my class explaining the meaning of the
sentence in Portuguese did I realize that “chuck” actually means “throw.” Now
the image of the woodchuck, who, until this revelation, looked kind of like a
beaver in my mind, has grown muscles and is in a field chucking wood,
javelin-style.
We start off every lesson with a senseless sentence. Now, I’m
wondering if it would be appropriate to teach my kids this one: I am a mother pheasant plucker, I pluck mother pheasants. I am
the best mother pheasant plucker that ever plucked a mother pheasant.
above: my
colleague teaches our English club a song and dance