Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers

I've been debating about whether or not to do this for some time, but when I read Bilbo's blog today and he decided to talk about Tom Swifties, I decided that I'd go ahead with it.


I don't know if Dr. Seuss is as popular among beginning readers today as he was when I just a wee bairn (ask fiona what it means), but he was oh, so much more than those bad movies The Cat In The Hat and How The Grinch Stole Christmas. If you didn't grow up reading Dr. Seuss, then your life is not as full as it should be.

My all-time favorite Dr. Seuss book is called Oh Say Can You Say, and it's a book of tongue twisters. I mentioned this once several years ago to my wife and, being the wonderful person that she is, she saw to it that a copy of the book ended up among my birthday gifts the next time it rolled around. As a 40-something year-old guy at the time, you might think I'd consider a kid's book as something of a gag gift. If so, then you don't know me at all. I was thrilled, and this book is right up there on my bookshelf along with all my grown-up books (including the complete Winnie The Pooh).


I think these show the brilliance of Dr. Seuss as much as any of the more famous books he wrote. Maybe this one wasn't as popular because it's challenging in a different way than most of his books (read up on loraxes some time). This book challenges on a more physical level and less on a moral or intellectual one. And by the way, if you think that Dr. Seuss' writing isn't normally intended to relay a moral or intellectual message, then you're just skimming the surface (same with A. A. Milne and Winnie The Pooh).

Most of the tongue twisters are very easy to read to yourself. The difficulty comes in saying them aloud. Even reading them aloud can cause you stumble.

Some of them don't actually have much of a twist until the very end, when you're rushing toward the finish:

One year we had a brunch
with Merry Christmas Mush to munch.
But I don't think you'd care for such.
We didn't like the mush munch much.

Dr. Seuss' excellence as a wordsmith is in the seeming simplicity of these words that he runs together in ways that would never, ever have occurred to me:

The storm starts
when the drops start dropping.
When the drops stop dropping
then the storm starts stopping.

Some of them consist of the more familiar tongue-twister formula of using very similar words in new ways that are just freaking hard to say:

Bed Spreaders spread spreads on beds.
Bread Spreaders spread butters on breads.
And that Bed Spreader better
watch out how he's spreading...
or that Bread Spreader's
sure going to butter his bedding.

One tongue-twister that I memorized some time ago didn't come from Dr. Seuss. I'm not sure of the origin, but since I'm in a tongue-twister mode here, I'll share it with you:

A tooter who tooted a flute
tried to tutor two tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
"Is it harder to toot or
to tutor two tooters to toot?"

But that one is child's play compared to some of the ones in this book. As you might have guessed, it's also marvelously illustrated with classic Dr. Seuss creatures and people, adding to its appeal. This last one may be my favorite from the book:

Upon an island hard to reach,
the East Beast sits upon his beach.
Upon the west beach sits the West Beast.
Each beach beast thinks that he's the best beast.

Which beast is best?... Well, I though at first
that the East was best and the West was worst.
Then I looked again from the west to the east
and I liked the beast on the east beach least.

Blogs are amazing things. They can even get a middle-aged guy to admit that he still occasionally reads Dr. Seuss and Winnie the Pooh.