Miscellaneous Exercises to
Improve Your Articulation

Read the following examples out loud:

•  Reading and writing are arts of striking importance.

•  Twanged short and sharp like the shrill swallow's cry.

•  The clumsy kitchen clock click clicked.

•  A big black bug bit a big black bear.

•  Geese cackle, cattle low, crows caw, cocks crow.

•  Good blood, bad blood. (Repeat.)

•  A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.

•  Bring me some ice, not some mice.

•  Make clean our hearts.

•  The old cold scold sold a school coal scuttle.

•  He sawed six-long slim sleek slender saplings.

•  Thrice six thick thistle sticks thrust straight through three throbbing thrushes.

•  Goodness centers in the heart.

•  He spoke reasonably, philosophically, disinterestedly, and yet particularly, of the unceremoniousness of their communicability, and peremptorily, authoritatively, unhesitatingly declared it to be wholly inexplicable.

•  Pillercatter, tappekiller, kitterpaller, patterkiller, caterpillar.

•  What whim led White Whitney to whittle, whistle, whisper and whimper near the wharf, where a floundering whale might wheel and whirl?

•  I said mixed biscuits, not bixed miscuits.

•  Little ache, little lake.

•  Her age, her rage.

•  Thou brid"dst thy tongue, wreath"dst thy lips with smiles, imprison"dst thy wrath, and truckl"dst to thine enemy"s power.

•  An inalienable eligibility of election which was of indisputable authority, rendered the interposition of his friends altogether supererogatory.

•  A ripe pear, a black cow, a fat turtle.

•  Ceaseth, approacheth, rejoiceth. (Repeat.)

•  A blush is a temporary eletheme and calorific effulgence of the physiognomy ocliologised by the perceptiveness of the sensorium when a predicament of unequilibrity from a sense of shame, anger, or other cause eventuating in a paresis of the vasomotor filaments of the facial capillaries where, being divested of their elasticity, they are suffused with radiant, aerated, com pound nutritive circulating liquid emanating from an intimidated proecordia.

•  Not long since a robust, disputative collegian, his clothes of the latest Pall Mall cut, his carmine bifurcated necktie ornamented with a solitaire, his hair dressed with oleomargarine and perfumed with ambergris, his face innocent of hirsute adornment, but his mouth guilty of nicotine, informed a senile, splenetic lawyer that he did not pronounce according to the dictionary.

"For," observed the young man, with an air of research, "in your Tuesday"s address you said that the sight of cerements sufficed to enervate an attorney; that a salamander treated for obesity with prussic acid and pomegranate rind was disinclined to serpentine movements; that in an Aldine edition of a legal work you read of a lugubrious man afflicted with virulent varioloid and bronchitis, for which a jocund allopathist injected iodine and cayenne pepper with a syringe warmed in a caldron of tepid sirup -a malpractise suit being the result. By the way, you have a dictionary?"

"Dictionary?" replied the lawyer; "pugh! It is a granary from which the pronunciation fiend fills his commissariat with orthoepic romances and vagaries which, to him, grow into a philologic fetish; and this fetishism finds outward expression in a supercilious ostentation of erudite vacuity."

Nothing daunted, the young man continued: "You said, "According to precedent it was obligatory upon him to plait his hair as his Nomad parents had done, but instead he, precedent to stepping under the mistletoe, indulged in fulsome praise of himself, hoping thereby to induce a favorite girl to join him. But she, being averse to undergo an ordeal so embarrassing, refused; whereupon his features became immobile with chagrin/ This is a verbatim quotation. You sometimes consult a dictionary ?"

"Young man," retorted the lawyer, his aquiline nose quivering with derisive disdain, "I have no use for a dictionary."

"Pardon me, your pronunciation indicates the contrary; thus, in your peroration this occurs: "An incognito communist, being commandant on the frontier, in one of his hunting expeditions came upon an Indian, who, to the accompaniment of the soughing wind, was softly playing a flageolet, for the purpose of quieting a wounded hydrophobic Bengal tiger, which, penned up in a hovel, was making hideous grimaces."

"The Colonel's companion, a comely but truculent Malay, acting as seneschal or pursuivant, suggested houghing the rampant animal, or giving it some dynamite, morphine, and saline yeast. "

"A noose was adjusted, and the nauseous dose administered, whereupon the combative tiger, thus harassed, coming in premature contact with a dilapidated divan, bade adieu to things sublunary. You have a dictionary?"

The old man, angered at the raillery of this question, and at the cherubic smile of superiority with which it was asked, launched forth in an objurgatory tirade, insisting that he did not regard himself acrificable to the juggernaut of orthoepy.