Monday, March 10, 2008

Word of the Day: Spoonerism


Did you know that English has three times more words than any other language (and it's still growing by about 450 words a year)? That's why we are so prone to spoonerisms. If you transpose the first letters of two words, you are likely to get two other words that still have meaning.


Spoonerisms are named for an English clergyman and dean at Oxford named William Archibald Spooner. He once raised a toast to Victoria by saying, "Three cheers for our queer old dean!" He also gave a speech applauding British farmers in which he referred to them as "those noble tons of soil." The examples below are also his.


I seem to be accidentally making spoonerisms more and more as I get older, so I thought I'd get the terminology down and provide a few examples:


Spoonerism: the transposition of the initial sounds in a pair of words.


Some examples of spoonerisms:


When the boys come back from France, we'll have the hags flung out.


Let me sew you to your sheet.




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