Carly, if you follow my link , you'll see some history about the announcers' test, courtesy of Girl Scout Troop 1440 in Wakefield, Mass., which, amazingly enough, is less than 20 miles from Lexington, where my sister lives. Surprisingly, however, my sister does not know the announcers' test, maybe because she grew up in Philadelphia--which, amazingly enough, is where I grew up as well. However, I did learn it in Philadelphia...Central High School, 1966. Apparently it dates from the 1940's in New York and was in fact a test for prospective radio announcers.

Jeanie, yours are fantastic! I consider myself fairly good at tongue twisters, but Peggy Babcock took me quite a while even to say more than once, and I'm far from having mastered it. You're right, one of the things that makes for a tough tongue twister is consonants that bounce back and forth from the front to the back of your mouth, what the speech pathologist would call velar and labial sounds: G and K mixed up with P and B.

Aloha,
Mark