As time goes on, Ridgewood students learn more and more tongue twisters to keep their enunciating faculties working in tip-top shape.  Here are a few more challenging twisters, each designed to exercise different qualities of agility in speech.

 

 

The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue,
the tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips.

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!*

What a to-do to die today, at a minute or two to two;
A thing distinctly hard to say, but harder still to do.
For they’ll beat a tattoo, at twenty to two
A rat-tat-tat- tat-tat-tat- tat-tat-tattoo
And a dragon will come when he hears the drum,
At a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.*

Trinidad!
And the big Mississippi
and the town Honolulu
and the lake Titicaca,
the Popocatepetl is not in Canada,
rather in Mexico, Mexico, Mexico!
Canada, Málaga, Rimini, Brindisi
Canada, Málaga, Rimini, Brindisi
Yes, Tibet, Tibet, Tibet, Tibet,
Nagasaki! Yokohama!
Nagasaki! Yokohama!**

Give me the gift of a grip-top sock,
A clip drape shipshape tip top sock.
Not your spinslick slapstick slipshod stock,
But a plastic, elastic grip-top sock.
None of your fantastic slack swap slop
From a slap dash flash cash haberdash shop.
Not a knick knack knitlock knockneed knickerbocker sock
With a mock-shot blob-mottled trick-ticker top clock.
Not a supersheet seersucker ruck sack sock,
Not a spot-speckled frog-freckled cheap sheik’s sock
Off a hodge-podge moss-blotched scotch-botched block.
Nothing slipshod drip drop flip flop or glip glop
Tip me to a tip top grip top sock.
–Dr. Seuss

Whether the weather is cold
Or whether the weather is hot
We’ll be together whatever the weather
Whether we like it or not.***

 

 

 

*In these poems, special attention is taken to pronounce the plosives – the hard consonants at the beginning, middle or endings of words.  Whereas one may not speak in this clipped or precise a manner at all times, we practice this way so we can choose to incorporate it when necessary.

**This poem is a translation of a German spoken chorus piece written by Ernst Toch.  It depends on a special attention to the rhythm and flow of the words.

***Special attention is taken to delineate a distinct difference between the “W” and the “WH” sounds of the poem so there is a noticeable separation between “WH-ether” and “W-eather.”