My favorite poem is “Bells” by Edgar Allen Poe because of the word sounds in it. He uses these word sounds to mimic and encourage readers to hear the bells sounding.

English is a rich language that has absorbed words from so many other languages. This gives a writer or speaker a range of words to choose from.

Consider the word blue. Picture it. Or can you? Is this blue royal? Teal? Navy? Perhaps it’s aqua or powder or sky or? All are blue. Each conjures up a different blue.

Then there is alliteration. What, you’ve never heard of it? Poor you. This is where English becomes fun.

The other day an office called to confirm an appointment time. The receptionist was almost unintelligible on the answering machine. Obviously she had never heard of alliteration.

Repeating word sounds in a sentence gives alliteration. Making this a phrase can result in a tongue twister.

The common tongue twisters are things like “Rubber baby buggy bumpers” or “She sells sea shells at the sea shore”. Try saying these out loud. How fast can you say them and still be understood?

Two other common ones are about Peter Piper and pickled peppers or woodchucks and wood. That last one brings in homonyms, words that sound the same, but have different meanings.

“For Love of Goats” began with a homonym set. A goat wondered whether a wether would go out in rainy weather.

The book became a celebration of word sounds both as alliterative stories or tongue twisters for each letter of the alphabet. All are about goats or something to do with goats.

These entries begged for illustrations. I learned a lot about watercolor illustrating doing them.

Tongue twisters are fun. They are a game teaching good diction, vocabulary, pronunciation and a love of word sounds.