Some years ago, teaching Phonetics I, I was at my wits’ end to make students produce the ‘short u’.

Knowing that ridiculous utterances containing many words with the same sound can make the sound memorable, I urged students to come up with some ‘nonsense utterances’, but wasn’t being very successful. So I decided to give an example myself and blurted out the first thing that came to my mind:

“I would do it in the woods if I could.”

Needless to say, those students still rub it in whenever I meet any of them!