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That time the world's fastest talker recited The Three Little Pigs on As It Happens

This episode of As It Happened: The Archive Edition is all about words. You'll meet the world's fastest talking woman, a school superintendent who wants to ban spelling bees and a professor who wrote a children's book to give new life to nature terms.

At a top speed of over 600 words per minute, Fran Capo huffed and puffed her way through the story in seconds

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In 2007, As It Happens spoke to the world's fastest talking woman. (Shutterstock/Hurst Photo)

The theme for this episode of our summer series As It Happened: The Archive Edition is "Words." 

Grab your dictionary and warm up your vocal cords, because this episode features some of the most loquacious linguists from the As It Happens archives.

You'll meet a New Brunswick wordsmith who can read, talk, and sing backwards. You'll hear one of oldest lyrical songs in the world. And you'll learn a secret language called "Egg" from an omelette's worth of Canadians fluent in the scrambled dialect.

Here are some of the highlights from this episode.

High speech chase

At a top speed of over 600 words per minute, Fran Capo holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-talking woman.

In 2007, As It Happens host Carol Off caught up — and tried to keep up — with Capo, as she talked her through some of her verbal gymnastics. 

"The first time I was clocked at 585 words per minute, and then I was clocked at 603.32 words per minute — well, actually, 603.32 words in 54.2 seconds, which comes out to 11 words a second," Capo said (in milliseconds).

At one point, Off asked Capo for a demonstration of her world famous motor mouth and she jumped into a rapid-fire reading of The Three Little Pigs.

Breaking the spell

Peter Negroni tried to B - A - N spelling bees.

In 1997, former As It Happens host Michael Enright spoke with the Springfield, Mass., school superintendent about his controversial idea. 

"I had a Texas [radio] station that said I was un-American and I had hoof-and-mouth disease," Negroni said. "One man said that I must have been a communist."

Despite the pushback, Negroni spelled out why he thought it was time to replace school spelling bees with lower-stress Scrabble competitions.

"To me, it's very simple. There's no need to embarrass children on the stage in order to teach them spelling. You can teach them spelling without doing that."

Peter Negroni called school spelling bees 'cruel and unusual punishment' and suggested that Scrabble games are a better tool to teach kids how to spell. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Hanging on to every word

Words and language are fluid and constantly in flux. And without a written record, for better or for worse, words and their meaning risk being forgotten. That's what prompted author Robert Macfarlane to write The Lost Words.

The children's book gives new life to a handful of nature words that the Oxford Junior Dictionary cut from its pages to free up space for technological terms.

In 2018, As It Happens host Carol Off spoke with Robert Macfarlane about the book and the magic of language that he hoped to capture in its pages.

"For each of those words, we wanted to make a summoning back — a magical procession," Macfarlane said. 

"Children are miraculous namers. And to name something, I think, is to know it a little better, to see it a little more clearly. And maybe to care for it a bit more."

The book includes words like acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow, and wren — which were replaced in the dictionary by technology terms like broadband and voicemail. (Sinisa Jolic/CBC)

You can hear these stories and more on the "Words" episode of As it Happened: The Archive Edition. 

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