I am probably brain damaged and autistic (with many other mental stuff) and I can say it fine. The brain damage is unrelated my mom's bf break checked me as a joke and nearly put me through his window
Hi. I’m an SLP- that phrase is a tongue twister basically , and the are a lot of sounds produced in the front, middle, and back of the mouth and doing this rapidly can be a challenge. The consonants in those words also appear as clusters, which are generally more work to produce such as fl, cr, st, etc you see the words. The /r/ sound in general is a little more tricky to produce because the shape your tongue makes, and it appears in buttery and crust. Also the /k/ sound =the c in crust, which the tongue shoots back then to make with the /r/ sound immediately following is a challenge as it’s at the end of a string of words which are a lot to say. In other words, you are okay, and this alone should not raise concerns! 😊
On the other hand, one Thanksgiving several years ago, my father, who is a minister and speaks 8 languages fluently, started speaking oddly - every word that began with a consonant came out as an /f/, so ‘turkey sandwich’ became ‘furkey fandwish.’ My brother and I, having never seen this before, started testing basic cognitive function, and he couldn’t do simple math or even read a simple sentence. It turned out he was having a TIA which he had felt coming on as a migraine and overmedicated himself with an opioid. We rushed him to the hospital and everything turned out fine after a few days, but lesson learned - not all tongue twisters are just that.
As a speech language pathologist, I find tongue twisters super fun. Some people struggle more than others to coordinate the incredibly rapid movements of the lips and tongue that make up speech. Unless they’re struggling in regular communication, have enjoy it!
Probably related to the high variation of mouth sounds in the front, middle, and back of the mouth. Diadochokinesia is the skill to be able to rapidly alternate between antagonistic sounds and dysdiadochokinesia is a loss of or decrease in that ability. Speech therapists test it with repeating words like Buttercup over and over or even just the sounds puh-tuh-kuh.
My absolute favourite thing to get people to try saying is “Irish wristwatch.” (Just to clarify I will now try to get people to say buttery flaky crust, too. I have an ARSENAL, mwuahaha!)
Oh geeze, the other examples people brought up were fine, but this one actually tripped me up. I would imagine depending on the accent ppl have it'll be easier or harder.
Iḿ dutch and I really do have a bit of braindamage but I could still say buttery etc. but this one? nope! perhaps its the English R I trip over?@@ashoka7273
The saying originated from a commercial of a local Maine restaurant called Dysart's! The video was viral here in ME 10 years ago, it's so funny to see it's become a trend now!!
I’m in CA and it was one of my favorite videos around that time! That sweet elderly man trying so hard, and his wife giving him such a hard time about it until she tried it herself and then her face when she messed it up too - just all pure perfection
You should look into why tongue twisters are sometimes easier when you're first learning a language than for native or more advanced speakers. There's a Chinese poem called 《施氏食獅史》 ("The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" - though I usually just call it "Ten Stone Lions") that is very difficult for native speakers to say out loud. When I was fairly new to Chinese, my teacher got me to read it out loud and she was so surprised at how easily I could do it that she literally took me around to the other classrooms to make the other teachers listen - none of them (all native speakers) could get through it. But after learning for a few years, I came back to that poem and realized it tripped me up now as much as it did them. My thought on it is that as a new learner I still had to consciously think about the tones and they didn't just come naturally, whereas now I'm used to the flow of the language and adjusting my tones as appropriate, but I'm not fully convinced that's the answer.
English has a very clear order you put discriptive words in. (Big red car vs red big car) Maybe since these fall into the same cathegory and the way they sound makes it somehow unnatural.
I was looking for this comment! Condition (flaky, in this case) usually comes before material (buttery). Deviating from that order purposefully really messes with our brains.
@@rebeccaobrien2642 Definitely not it, because "flakey, buttery crust" is also hard to say with the repeating 'r' sound. It's just a tongue movement thing, some people are worse at deft tongue movements than others. Some people, like the British, especially struggle with an 'r' because they don't voice it.
I feel like the original video of the people messing it up, is because they had to do multiple takes. And, I know for certain that when you say a word over and over, it stops being words and just feels like weird sound. THAT, plus "baked in a buttery flakey crust" is a slight tongue twister so, good combo lmao
@@baggypop7536sorry I meant it can become a bit tongue twister after repeat sayings. Like it's got "BAked in a BUttery", so a bit of alliteration, and if you think way tooo hard about it then yeah idk haha
There was a point where I forgot how to say saddle, I could only say salad in a weird verbal dyslexia. I put myself through exercises where I forced myself to say saddle and salad while driving to work in various patterns until I could mostly say it, but it still feels a little like brushing your teeth with your off hand.
Yes! This! As a TBI survivor who went undiagnosed for far too long, and as it took my father 3 years to be diagnosed with a neurological problem, with a sister who is hard of hearing, I support and endorse this message!!!!
I think this is popular due to the viral ad blooper where the older lady kept messing it up ("baked in a buttery flakey crust") and busted out laughing
I think its just like a weird "not really" tongue twister hhahahaha But once you start changing the word to a complete other one thats when id worry, like how she said CALORIE instead of the intended word hahaha
Ya, I'm worried now... years ago, I accidentally said "chicken milk" instead of gingerale, and I called oven mitts "tonkenblanks". My family just thought it was funny, and we actually still use those words to this day. Now I'll have to Google early onset alzheimers or something, I'm only 44! 😮
What you really need to do is 1) ask everyone what they see when they’re imagining counting sheep. 2) ask if they have an inner monologue. Believe it or not, some people don’t.
Tongue twisters simply take practice, provided someone doesn't have issues with neurology or another medical thing. People who do theater can easily rattle off tons of tongue twisters with almost no effort, because they do it a lot. The hardest such tongue twister, according to the Guinness book: "The sixth sheik sixth sheep's sick." I can do it really easily.
What's weird is that I actually have trouble with other combinations and even word finding issues, but absolutely no trouble pronouncing this phrase out loud. The comments are really interesting! Thank you so much to all of the speech pathologists who chimed in! Truly fascinating.
It's like when African Americans try to speak simple English. But it comes out like "who dat is?" Or "No Officer, I shall calmly comply to your simple requests".
1975 I was bicycling through the British Isles and got off course. I stopped to ask a lady for directions. Her cockney accent was so strong I could not possibly understand her; but what was really funny is she couldn’t understand mine! Never mind the Irish…🤣
Im a singer and I found this effortless. We focus on our vowel shapes to get them to match to everyone else so the speech sounds more uniform (and in tune since vowels have overtones if youre getting technical). We also have to rhythmically time our consonants so that no ones late and it sounds clear enough for people to hear, even when you have a distraction going on such as running out of breath. We learn to manage tricky speech as we juggle bigger problems!
Nvm. When I shut off my music brain and wondered if it was adjective order then I started saying bakey fluttery. There's something wrong with the meaning of those words. They're too similar.
There are things we use to check for dysphasia & understanding when a stroke is suspected. Not THAT phrase but several other simple ones that go through the most common letter sounds.
We rly be out here doing mild social experiments on our loved ones and im very comforted that I’m not alone but dreading inevitably becoming the test subject one day
I have another one for you - overheard in a UK bakery shop one lunchtime "Have you got a flaky pastry pastie?" I think its the alliteration of the 'p's and the repeated 'a' sounds that makes it tricky to say. 😅 (personally I have no problem saying ' baked in a buttery flaky crust' but i did have Speech & Drama lessons as a child, and learnt to sight read, including difficult words, so I think that helps)😅
As a fellow SLP I echo the responses above!! Frequency of those sounds together in the native language of the speaker also likely has to do with how well people can produce the phrase. Mostly is hard just because your tongue is doing backflips in your mouth, though 😂.
Hi Hank, ER doctor here... I think what you're looking for is the term staccato speech which is something we particularly look for and ask patients to say similar phrases like 'British Constitution ' in the UK so very similar to what you'd like your doc to do for you. Associated with a couple of different neurological conditions
Everybody I’ve asked have no trouble saying it. They all have Swedish accents so I think it can be explained by: “The most noticeable thing in a typical Swedish accent in English is the “clearer" Ls and the dental or retroflex pronunciation of Ts and Ds.” It would be interesting to hear different English accents and variants to compare with each other!
linguist perspective rather than SLP or neuro, who have already said it in other ways: it's because you're moving between parts of your mouth very quickly, and the mouth doesn't like doing that! english in particular wants to put this very middling, grunting "uh", /ə/ the schwa, wherever it can. it makes transitioning from front sounds like /b/ and back sounds like /k/ much easier. british english in particular has a greater tendency towards long, drawn out, lax vowels than american english, so it will naturally be a tongue twister for them!
Tongue twisters are usually really hard for people with tempol brain problems. A lot of physical coordination and word centers are in the temporal area of the brain so it's an easy test. I have a walnut of scar tissue in my temporal brain from a stroke I had in my 30s care of a genetic disorder that effects the vains in my head. My speech is word salad, my ability to think is unaffected, but getting the words together and out can be very difficult.
What's also interesting, apparently (an old teacher of mine told me about this but I never really looked it up to see if its true) some English tongue twisters are no problem for non native speaking people but native speakers are going to have a hard time trying it.
What makes it even odder for me is the entire order of the sentence is rearranged or mashed together. It'd be one thing to just stumble on the words, but the rearrangement, total absence, or even addition of entirely different words is something else
It’s just easy for your tongue to get confused between the two alveolar approximants /l/ and /r/ in this phrase bc it’s a lot of work to go back and forth in the mouth not much deeper than that
To me this reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s natural order of adjective, where “big red balloons” is the correct way of speaking and “red big balloons” sounds wrong. Flaky buttery crust seems to roll off the tongue for me compared to buttery flaky.
Hang on, Hank... You said it perfectly first time. And second time. Why do you think you have a problem with it? Oh, it's not you you're talking about. It's a bit of a tongue twister. The diagnostic value would manifest if you can say it one day and not the next. Red lorry yellow lorry. Tongue twisters might have a hidden value for body language experts and interrogators. Watch where the eyes go when a person is trying to repeat a tongue twister. Maybe. Does anybody else look down and to the right when trying to say a tongue twister correctly? Is that thinking/concentration rather than remembering?
I believe they are referencing a specific video. There is a blooper real from a commercial where the actor continually fails to say "Baked in a buttery flaky crust". A lot of the same variations you see in these new videos are very close to the ones he says in the blooper reel. The video came out 12 years ago, so there may be some 10th anniversary hype around it.
