Where is the peck of pickled peppers

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. Patience is a virtue. Before I tell you, you need to know that Peter Piper is based on a real person. Peter Poivre was a British colonial administrator, missionary, and horticulturalist who loomed over the island of Mauritius in the s.

He established a tropical botanical garden in , arguably the first of its kind anywhere. About 37 hectares of it still exists today in northern Mauritius: the Botanical Garden of Pamplemousses. Poivre is credited with smuggling clove and nutmeg seeds out of the Spice Islands the Maluku Islands, also written Moluccas in prior times, in present-day Indonesia, just east of Sulawesi and west of Irian Jaya , then controlled by the Dutch.

From there, those seeds and herbarium seedlings ended up in several places within the British Empire of the day, including the Seychelles and here in Singapore, when spices were worth their weight in gold. As for the rhyme itself, no one knows who came up with it, so no exact answer to the question posed above exists.

Harris was obviously interested in promoting fine elocution, not in amusing babies in nurseries, and the publisher who let him get away with that title arguably deserved electrocution. But the book sold well enough, and the rest, as they say, is history. Whoever made up the rhyme knew Latin. How so? Because Piper is substituted for Poivre, and piper is Latin for pepper. Poivre , of course, is French for pepper. The Dutch for pepper? Peper , of course.

Which begs the question: Where did the root for the English word pepper come from? Yes, you heard right: because by roughly the s BCE the ancient United Kingdom of Israel had established robust trade ties with India, known as the land of Ophir in the Bible.

Evidence for this may be found in the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible itself. These include the word for parrot tukki , from tokai in Tamil, which originally meant the back feathers of a male peacock , and a word for beryl or topaz tarshish. Tarshish, of course, is the place to which Jonah tries to flee after God tells him to go to Nineveh, and is often presumed by commentators to be Spain; more likely it refers to the west coast of India, probably near Cochin. One of these Indic-origin words is pippali , likely from the Sanskrit, or pilpil as it travelled west into Aramaic and Hebrew, or pepper as it came down to us in English via piperi in Greek and piper in Latin.

But be careful: The kind of pepper these words initially referred to is not the same kind as you probably assume it to be—fear not, however, for elucidation awaits just below. When it does show up, however, the study of it eventually came to embody a word closely derived from pilpil , namely pilpul.

Usually the effort to understand and interpret references older texts—especially the Torah, but also the Prophets and the Holy Writings—and sometimes texts written even long after the codification of the Talmud. So a havrutah involves a virtual multigenerational conversation embedded in written texts launched by a rapid-fire oral-dialogical exercise.

A weak consensus exists that the method itself is not that old; most date it back only to the late 15 th century in Central Europe, where it is associated with the Maharal of Prague and exegetes such as Yacub Pollak and Shalom Shachna.

But however old the method, the inference is obvious as to how the name arose: One shakes pepper onto food in rapid sprays of spice dust; in a similar way, words burst forth from the two sides of a havrutah : They are metaphorically spicy and rapidly strewn.

Picture mouths drawn as dueling pepper shakers. That about captures it, save for a tiny bit of promised etymological clean-up. The spice that people in ancient Greece and then Rome cared about from as early as the fifth century BCE came from India, and they cared about it as a medicine as well as a spice.

This was the long pepper— piper longum , from the piperaceae family. Black pepper— piper nigrum —comes from the same piperaceae family but is native to the aforementioned Maluku Spice Islands. Yet another variety of the piperaceae family is the Java pepper— piper retrofractum —which is native to Java and Bali; the fruit looks like a stubbier version of the long pepper. Black pepper arrived in Europe via the caravan trade in about the 12 th century, a trade dear to Jewish merchants, who uniquely maintained a presence at several caravan route points, including the nearest-to-retail-market terminus.

Ever wonder why the surname Peretz is relatively common among Russian Jews? Black pepper eventually displaced the long pepper in European markets because it was much cheaper. Like the Romans before them, Europeans began referring to the useful part of both plants by the same word— piper , pepper, and so on, depending on the vernacular of the time and place.

Legend has it the rhyme is a tribute to 19th century English paleontologist Mary Anning. Anning was an impressive fossil hunter who is thought to have been responsible for scientific achievements from discovering the first articulated plesiosaur to being among the first to identify fossilized poop—though her male contemporaries had a frustrating way of swiping credit from her. The first known suggestion that the verse was related to Anning seems to be a book Henry De la Beche: Observations on an Observer , though it was only raised as a possibility and there was no source offered for the reference.

This is certainly Ice Cream Weather. Have you a good Ice Cream Freezer? Maybe the best-known one-word tongue twister, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious isn't short on complicated back story. Most people associate the mouthful of a nonsense word with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke dancing with cartoons from the movie adaptation of P. Travers's book series Mary Poppins. The Shermans claimed they'd learned the funny word at camp as children in the '30s. Young and Parker said Young had made up the word as a kid in and the pair had sent their song to Disney in Later, another instance of the word being used in , this time spelled supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus , was discovered.

It had appeared in the Syracuse University student newspaper [ PDF ], and the writer of the column claimed she'd been the one who made it up, too.

As part of the th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, where the facilitators were looking to find how certain speech patterns work psychologically, volunteers were recorded during the project reciting different types of twisters—and Pad Kid caused the most trouble. Because of the phrase's alliteration and words with similar sounds, the brain makes it difficult to repeat quickly without a mistake.

But as the official category no longer exists, the MIT creation just might take the tongue twister cake. Many of the songs featured also include links to the Mama Lisa website, where you can find recordings, videos and sheet music. Over 50 lullabies and recordings from all over the world. Each Lullaby includes the full text in the original language, with an English translation.

Please contribute a traditional song or rhyme from your country. This is the most well-known tongue twister in the English language…. Tongue Twister. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

Notes A peck is a measurement used for dried goods. Comments Curry and Clippinger wrote: "Halliwell suggests that 'off a pewter plate' is sometimes added at the end of each line. Mama Lisa's Books Our books feature songs in the original languages, with translations into English. Kid Songs Around The World. Paperback on Amazon.