Nothing Licks Like...
Writing Challenge 2024
Posted by Chris Sissons on Jun 5, 2024
Writing Challenge ยป Chris Sissons
Funny things, tongues. There they are, in your mouth and always busy, busy, busy. And yet they rarely cause any trouble, except when they get bitten. In which case they raise hell, like no other part of the body. It's worse than treading on Lego, probably.
The most important thing they do is taste stuff. Usually food or drink but not always. I remember a lecturer at University. He was an expert on insects. He would squish moths and taste them to find out whether they were poisonous. I don’t recommend this and neither do the moths.
I recently had a cold and lost my sense of taste. Creating a delicious meal and sitting in front of it and thinking, do I have to eat all this? It smelt off and tasted like damp cardboard but with something nasty added. It was only a few days but it felt like forever.
They also have a side job of forming words. Tongues don’t create voice but they do create words. And they somehow know how to form a word without thinking about it. They don’t always get it right but they can be consistently wrong. As a kid dragged up in Sheffield, I could never get the hang of “th”. I remember being paraded in front of the class, aged about 8 years and I couldn’t hear the difference putting your tongue between your teeth made to words like the or they. Sheffielders are generally wary of anything with a “t” in it, substituting a glottal stop. And I was mercilessly laughed at when at University because I pronounced my name as if it had two zs in the middle.
Now I’m a public speaker and local preacher. Woe betide anyone who picks me up on pronunciation these days! My tongue and I have reached an accord and no one can come between us. (Except when I’m recording online and everything seems to go wrong – I’ve found I’m ten times better when I can see my audience.)
Finally, I should mention you can lick things. What you lick is up to you but I don’t recommend you do it in public, except perhaps ice creams but even then, probably best not to.
This is Day 15 of Writing Challenge 2024. People all over the world take part in the WC. We write something every weekday for 4 weeks based on a prompt This year, I'll be sharing 21 articles based loosely on prompts about parts of the body. Do we fully appreciate the role things and stuff play in our lives? Each part of the body has certain things and stuff associated with it. (Probably!) I've no idea where this will go but hope you enjoy the journey. The introductory post was Things and Stuff. The last post was Heart-Shaped Hearts and the next is Brass Neck.
I didn't have any ice cream, so you must put up with my Podcast recording gear!
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