(See also Arthur the Rat and The Rainbow Passage)
Well, here's a story for you: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had
been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory,
so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in
North Square near the Duke Street Tower. That area was much nearer for her
and more to her liking.
Even so, on her first morning, she felt stressed. She ate a bowl of
porridge, checked herself in the mirror and washed her face in a hurry.
Then she put on a plain yellow dress and a fleece jacket, picked up her
kit and headed for work.
When she got there, there was a woman with a goose waiting for her. The
woman gave Sarah an official letter from the vet. The letter implied that
the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease,
which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in
a dog or a goat. Sarah was sentimental, so this made her feel sorry for
the beautiful bird.
Before long, that itchy goose began to strut around the office like a
lunatic, which made an unsanitary mess. The goose's owner, Mary Harrison,
kept calling, "Comma, Comma," which Sarah thought was an odd choice for a
name.
Comma was strong and huge, so it would take some force to trap her, but
Sarah had a different idea. First she tried gently stroking the goose's
lower back with her palm, then singing a tune to her. Finally, she
administered ether. Her efforts were not futile. In no time, the goose
began to tire, so Sarah was able to hold onto Comma and give her a
relaxing bath.
Once Sarah had managed to bathe the goose, she wiped her off with a
cloth and laid her on her right side. Then Sarah confirmed the vet's
diagnosis. Almost immediately, she remembered an effective treatment that
required her to measure out a lot of medicine. Sarah warned that this
course of treatment might be expensive — either five or six times
the cost of penicillin. I can’t imagine paying so much, but Mrs. Harrison
— a millionaire lawyer — thought it was a fair price for a
cure.
[From a 26 July 2000 note by Doug Honorof to the ADS-L
list:]
We have devised a diagnostic passage for use by field researchers
investigating accents of English. We believe it contains all the Wellsian
lexical set names, all the consonants of English accents (in all
interesting positions?), and a number of other words and phrases intended
to expose interesting phenomena. We wrote it in part as a replacement for
the Rainbow Passage. We are aiming at a text
that flows well, follows international usage wherever relevant and sounds
fairly colloquial in as many varieties of English as possible insofar as a
read passage can.
Comma Gets a Cure and derivative works may be used freely for
any purpose without special permission provided the present sentence and
the following copyright notification accompany the passage in print, if
reproduced in print, and in audio format in the case of a sound recording:
Copyright 2000 Douglas N. Honorof, Jill McCullough & Barbara
Somerville. All rights reserved.
We thank the following people for helpful comments on an earlier
version of the passage: Alice Faber of Haskins Laboratories, Paul Meier of
the University of Kansas, Rudy Troike of the University of Arizona and
Enid Parsons, Pronunciation Editor for the Random House Dictionaries,
Ginny Kopf of the University of Central Florida. All flaws and limitations
of the passage remain the sole responsibility of the editor and of his
collaborators. The editor acknowledges having received support from NIH
Grant DC-03782 to Haskins Laboratories during the preparation of the
present work. Please send comments to honorof@verberations.com,
%Haskins Laboratories, 270 Crown Street, New Haven, CT 06511, USA (Tel.
+1-203-865-6163).