So, I don’t know if this is good news or not, but scientists at MIT have recently created what they’re calling “The world’s most difficult tongue twister.”

Yeah, there’s not a whole lot to do in Massachusetts.

To most of us, tongue twisters seem like an innocent waste of time. Do we really have to practice saying these phrases? When, in my day-to-day life, am I ever going to have to say the phrase, “Brad’s big black bath brush broke!” ten times fast? Give Brad some privacy.

So some people refuse to participate in tongue twisters. And then there are people like my wife, who will agree to say them, but then they’ll pause after each time they say the line. So they’re not saying it 10 times fast; they’re saying it one time fast, 10 times in a row.

But it turns out there is a scientific purpose to these things. According to the scientists involved in the study, tongue twisters can help us shed light on the brain’s speech-planning process.

To conduct the study, researchers called in various subjects and had them read different lines. And the line the researchers ultimately put together that apparently got the volunteers to give up and stop speaking altogether was, “Pad kid poured curd pulled cold.” Say that 10 times fast.

Why?

I don’t know; the phrase makes no sense. What’s a “pad kid”? A kid who sells small notebooks? Or a kid who always walks around with small notebooks, like the people at MIT? I don’t know. I can’t think of a single instance in real life where you’d ever have to say that. Is that fair? Can you just put together a string of words that don’t make sense and say, “No one can say this”? No one wants to say this.

On the other hand, if you think about it, how much sense do the other tongue twisters make? Let’s take one of the most famous ones:

“She sells seashells at the seashore.”

Why is she selling seashells at the seashore? Isn’t that like selling ice to Eskimos? Are there couples walking along the shore going, “Well, we need seashells, but I don’t feel like looking for them. Oh, look, there’s a sheasell shtand!”

“Seashell stand.”

“What did I say?”

Personally, I think it’s a front for some sort of illegal operation.

But we can ask questions on most of the other tongue twisters too. This one, for example:

“If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?”

That depends. How many peppers are in a peck?

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

Oh. Frankly, I always thought it was a pack of pickled peppers. I didn’t know “peck” was a word. I never had a recipe call for “one peck of peppers, pickled.” What was he making?

So I looked it up. Apparently, a peck is “a unit of dry measure, equal to about 2 gallons. It’s also equal to a quarter of a bushel.” (A bushel is a small bush.)

So as I see it, he probably came home, and Mrs. Piper was like, “I said a pack of pickled peppers! What am I going to do with two gallons of peppers?”

But a lot of people have difficulty with this tongue twister—not because it’s hard to say, but because generally, when you’re picking peppers, they’re not pickled yet. Most people tend to pickle their vegetables after they’re picked. It’s much more efficient that way.

I personally don’t think this is an issue, because no one said he was picking them from the ground. Maybe they’re already pickled, in a jar, and he walks into the pickle store, and they say, “Well, we have pickled cucumbers, pickled peppers, pickled herring… What’ll it be?” and he picks pickled peppers. Because the last time he came home with two gallons of pickled herring, his wife went to her parents for a week.

But questions or not, at least those sentences make some sort of grammatical sense. As opposed to “Pad kid poured curd pulled cold.”

And it’s not even the hardest one. There are much harder tongue twisters, and each one has its own nonsensical quirks that just invite problems:

• “If Stu chews shoes, should Stu choose the shoes he chews?” (I don’t know. It sounds like Stu has an eating disorder.)

• “A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits and a biscuit mixer.” (It sounds like someone’s throwing a party for his dog. Or for Stu.)

• “If you’re going to begin to toboggan, don’t buy too big a toboggan. Too big a toboggan is too big a toboggan to buy to begin to toboggan.” (You also have to be able to fit it into your car. That’s not always something people think about until they get out to the parking lot.)

• “She had shoulder surgery.” (Maybe she bought too big a toboggan.)

And anyway, the most difficult tongue twister, in my opinion, is “Irish wristwatch.” I can’t even say that once.

I’m going to try it on my wife.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, The Jewish Press, and Aish.com, among others. He also has four books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].

By Mordechai Schmutter