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It's difficult to search for an abstract concept if you don't know what it's called -- we tried some fancy advanced keyword searches on a few of our favorite search engines, and even asked the Web's best-known butler, with no success. Instead, we decided to take a look at one of our favorite Yahoo! categories: Words and Wordplay. As we browsed the list of sub-categories, our eyes began to glaze over -- eponyms, homonyms, oxymorons, palindromes, and then... Aha! We spied Spoonerisms -- a "reversal of the initial letters or
syllables of two or more words," according to a definition from the Encyclopędia Britannica. We clicked over to a collection of sites about these sometimes deliberate, often humorous reversals. A glance at the name of one site, Reverend Spooner's Tips of the Slung, confirmed that we we're in the right place. Here are some fun spoonerisms in action: - a blushing crow (for a crushing blow)
- half-warmed fish (for half-formed wish)
- butterfly (for flutterby, which allegedly was the original name for these winged insects)
Spoonerisms are named for William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), a distinguished Anglican clergyman from Oxford who nervously spouted legendary phrases like "is the
bean dizzy?" in lieu of "is the dean busy?" For more insight we read Victoria A. Fromkin's essay titled Slips of the Tongue: Windows to the Mind. A spoonerism is similar to, but not to be confused with, a mondegreen, as recently featured on the entertaining A.Word.A.Day mailing list. A mondegreen is "a word or phrase resulting from a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard." Like spoonerisms, these are instances of "aural dyslexia" or Freudian slips, depending on your point of view. If these linguistic twists amuse you, check out the Yahoo! Misunderstood Lyrics category, featuring classics like "The ants are
my friends," from Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," and Jimi Hendrix's timeless lyric, "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy."
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