Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

*According to a recent article in The New Yorker, were it not for the Heimlich maneuver, all of the following people might have choked: Cher (vitamin pill), Carrie Fisher (Brussels sprout), Dick Vitale (melon), Ellen Barkin (shrimp), and Homer Simpson (doughnut). The article continued with a list of "heroes," celebrities who saved others from certain death: "Tom Brokaw (John Chancellor, Gouda cheese), Verne Lundquist (Pat Haden, broccoli), Pierce Brosnan (Halle Berry, fruit), Justin Timberlake (a friend, nuts), Billy Bob Thornton (his potbellied pig Albert, chicken Marsala)." Especially eerie was the tale of actor Mandy Patinkin, saved from a caesar salad just three weeks after wrapping a film called — I kid you not — The Choking Man.

tion can only do so much; even where languages allegedly refer to objects by their sounds — the phenomenon known as onomatopoeia

— the "sounds" we refer to sound like, well, words. Woof is a perfectly well formed English word, a cross between, say, wool and hoof but not a faithful reproduction of Ari's vocalization (nor that of any other dog). And the comparable words in other languages each sound different, none exactly like a woof or a bark. French dogs go ouah, ouah, Albanian dogs go ham, ham, Greek dogs go gav, gov, Korean dogs go mung, mung, Italian dogs go bau, ban, German dogs wau, wau: each language creates the sound in its own way. Why? Because our vocal tract is a clumsy contraption that is good for making the sounds of speech — and little else.

Tongue-twisters emerge as a consequence of the complicated dance that the articulators perform. It's not enough to close our mouth or move our tongue in a basic set of movements; we have to coordinate each one in precisely timed ways. Two words can be made up of exactly the same physical motions performed in a slightly different sequence. Mad and ban, for example, each require the same four crucial movements — the velum (soft palate) widens, the tongue tip moves toward alveolar closure, the tongue body widens in the pharynx, and the lips close — but one of those gestures is produced early in one word (mad) and late in another (ban). Problems occur as speech speeds up — it gets harder and harder to get the timing right. Instead of building a separate timer (a clock) for each gesture, nature forces one timer into double (or triple, or quadruple) duty.

And that timer, which evolved long before language, is really good at only very simple rhythms: keeping things either exactly in phase (clapping) or exactly out of phase (alternating steps in walking, alternating strokes in swimming, and so forth). All that is fine for walking or running, but not if you need to perform an action with a more complex rhythm. Try, for example, to tap your right hand at twice the rate of your left. If you start out slow, this should be easy. But now gradually increase the tempo. Sooner or later you will find that the rhythm of your tapping will break down (the technical term is devolve) from a ratio of 2:1 to a ratio of 1:1.

Which returns us to tongue-twisters. Saying the words she sells properly involves a challenging coordination of movements, very much akin to tapping at the 2:1 ratio. If you first say the words she and sells aloud, slowly and separately, you'll realize that the Is/ and /sh/ sounds have something in common — a tongue-tip movement — but only /sh/ also includes a tongue-body gesture. Saying she sells properly thus requires coordinating two tongue-tip gestures with one tongue-body gesture. When you say the words slowly, everything is okay, but say them fast, and you'll stress the internal clock. The ratio eventually devolves to 1:1, and you wind up sticking in a tongue-body gesture for every tongue-tip gesture, rather than every other one. Voilא, she sells has become she shells. What "twists" your tongue, in short, is not a muscle but a limitation in an ancestral timing mechanism.