How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?
American English language tongue-twister From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck" (sometimes phrased with "could" rather than "would") is an American English-language tongue-twister.[1][2] The woodchuck, a word originating from Algonquian "wejack", is a kind of marmot, regionally called a groundhog.[3] The complete beginning of the tongue-twister usually goes: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"[1][2] The tongue-twister relies primarily on alliteration to achieve its effects, with five "w" sounds interspersed among five "ch" sounds,[4] as well as 6 "ood" sounds.
Answers
Summarize
Perspective
A traditional, if nonsensical, "response" to the question is: "A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood".[5] Other—similarly unhelpful—responses include "So much wood would a woodchuck chuck as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood!", "He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.",[6] "He would chuck as much as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.",[7] and "As much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood!"
A 1957 Associated Press piece refers to the question as "a riddle which beats the Sphinx, since it's still unanswered".[8] A more concrete answer was published by the Associated Press in 1988, which reported that a New York fish and wildlife technician named Richard Thomas had calculated the volume of dirt in a typical 25–30-foot (7.6–9.1 m) long woodchuck burrow and had determined that if the woodchuck had moved an equivalent volume of wood, it could move "about 700 pounds (320 kg) on a good day, with the wind at his back".[9][10] Another study, which considered "chuck" to be the opposite of upchucking, determined that a woodchuck could ingest 362 cm3 (22 cu in)[11] of wood per day.[12]
Origin
The origin of the phrase is from a 1902 song "The Woodchuck Song", written by Robert Hobart Davis for Fay Templeton in the musical The Runaways.[13][14] The lyrics became better known in a 1904 version of the song written by Theodore Morse, with a chorus of "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?",[15] which was recorded by Ragtime Roberts, in 1904.[16]
It is used in the title of Werner Herzog's 1976 film How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, a documentation of the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship in New Holland, Pennsylvania.
Popular culture
- The 1992 video-game Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge features an exchange between protagonist Guybrush Threepwood and Woody the Woodsmith, in which five different takes on this tongue-twister are used as questions and responses.
- Google features this tongue twister as an Easter egg in its search engine, as well as Google Now.[17][18][19] Several other virtual assistants, including Siri and Cortana, have their own unique, humorous responses to the phrase.[20][21]
See also
References
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