Rear Deeders, how your beds. Let us salute the eponymous master
of the verbal somersault, the Rev. William Archibald Spooner. He left
us all a legacy of laughter.
He also gave the dictionary a new entry: SPOONERISM. The
very word brings a smile. It refers to the linguistic flip-flops that
turn "a well-oiled bicycle" into "a well-boiled icicle" and other ludicrous
ways speakers of English get their mix all talked up.
English is a fertile soil for spoonerisms, as author and lecturer Richard
Lederer points out, because our language has more than three times as many
words as any other -- 616,500 and growing at 450 a year. Consequently,
there's a greater chance that any accidental transposition of letters or
syllables will produce rhyming substitutes that still make sense -- sort
of.
"Spooner," says Lederer, "gave us tinglish errors and English terrors
at the same time."
Born in 1844 in London, Spooner became an Anglican priest and a scholar.
During a 60-year association with Oxford University, he lectured in
history, philosophy, and divinity. From 1876 to 1889, he served as
a dean, and from 1903 to 1924 as warden, or president.
Spooner was an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight, and a
head too large for his body. His reputation was that of a genial, kindly,
hospitable man.
He seems also to have been somewhat of an absent-minded professor. He
once invited a faculty member to tea "to welcome our new archeology Fellow."
"But, sir," the man replied, "I AM our new archeology Fellow."
"Never mind," Spooner said. "Come all the same."
After a Sunday service, he turned back to the pulpit and informed his
student audience: "In the sermon I have just preached, whenever I said Aristotle,
I meant St. Paul."
But Spooner was no featherbrain. In fact, his mind was so nimble
his tongue couldn't keep up. The Greeks had a word for this type of
impediment long before Spooner was born: METATHESIS. It means the act
of switching things around.
Reverend Spooner's tendency to get words and sounds crossed up could
happen at any time, but especially when he was agitated. He reprimanded
one student for "fighting a liar in the quadrangle" and another who "hissed
my mystery lecture." To the latter he added in disgust, "You have tasted
two worms."
Patriotic fervor excited Spooner as well. He raised his toast
to Her Highness Victoria: "Three cheers for our queer old dean!" During
WWI he reassured his students, "When our boys come home from France, we will
have the hags flung out," and he lionized Britain's farmers as "noble tons
of soil."
His goofs at chapel were legendary. "The Lord is thy shoving leopard,"
he once intoned. He quoted I Corinthians 13:12 as, "For now we see
through a dark, glassly..." Officiating at a wedding, he prompted a
hesitant bridegroom, "Son, it is now kisstomary to cuss the bride." And
to a stranger seated in the wrong place: "I believe you're occupewing my
pie. May I sew you to another sheet?"
Did Spooner really say, "Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed
fish?" He certainly could have -- he was trying to say "half-formed
wish."
Lederer offers these other authentic spoonerisms:
At a naval review Spooner marveled at "this vast display of cattle ships
and bruisers."
To a school official's secretary: "Is the bean dizzy?"
Visiting a friend's country cottage: "You have a nosy little cook here."
Two years before his death in 1930 at age 86, Spooner told an interviewer
he could recall only one of his trademark fluffs. It was one he made
announcing the hymn, "Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take," meaning to say
"Conquering Kings."
So if you have made a verbal slip, rest easy. Many have. Radio
announcer Harry Von Zell once introduced the president as Hoobert Heever.
And Lowell Thomas presented British minister Sir Stafford Cripps and
Sir Stifford Craps.
Thanks to Reverend Spooner's style-setting somersaults, our own little
tips of the slung will not be looked upon as the embarrassing babblings of
a nitwit, but rather the whimsical lapses of a nimble brain.
So let us applaud that gentle man who lent his tame to the nerm. May
sod rest his goal.