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Word Avalanches: My New Favorite Obsession

Word Avalanches: My New Favorite Obsession

January 15, 2019 7:41 pmComments are Disabled

My favorite recent reddit discovery is /r/WordAvalanches. It’s a wonderful collection of grammatically correct tongue twisters that build on a common sound, phoneme or rhyming structure, always, of course, introduced with a setup.

For instance, “The guy who sketches crossbreed dogs is suitable for the role.” In other words, “The labradoodle doodle dude’ll do.”

Another favorite: “Let me get this straight: the losing liberals deserted the remaining conservatives to fix the fallen goalpost?” In fact one could say, “Right, the down left downright up and left the left right to right the down upright.”

Trying your hand at these is easier than it seems. Recently I was talking with a friend about bald-faced lies, or whether they were actually called bold-faced lies. But in reality, one could tell a bold, bald-faced lie. In an email, it could be a boldface, bald-faced lie. We riffed on this for a while until we came up with: if you’ve been set aback by a particularly forceful email containing an untruth regarding breakfast cereal, one could say you’ve been bowled by a bold, boldface, bald-faced, bowl-based lie.

And so on. I was wondering what the longest of these ever has been. Fortunately, reddit has the answer. I’ll let you click through to read it, but it starts:

Core orc core-core-cork-core-ore-corps, or ‘Core Cork-Core Orc Corps’, cord-cored core ‘Core Cork-Core Orc Corps’ cork-core’s ores; cord-core Corps orcs scored ‘Core Cork-Core Orc Corps’ cored-ore cord-core, orc or orc; orcs scored, ‘Core Cork-Core Orc Corps’ cord-core orc cord-cored o’er ‘Core Cork-Core Orc Corps’ cord-core orc…

Words are fun.

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