Last week I was scrolling through my blog reader when I came upon an interesting entry from this linguistics blog. The entry spoke of something I tend to do often; I just didn't know there was a term for it.
Spoonerism. Yes, funny name but as I learned, the term was named after Reverend William Archibald Spooner.
So what is a spoonerism? According to good ol' Wikipedia (which is not a scholarly reference but bear with me), "A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched."
An example can be seen in the title of this post. If I meant to say freaky cat it may come out as creaky fat. Other examples include wave the sails (save the whales), this is the pun fart (this is the fun part), and my zips are lipped (my lips are zipped).
Have you created a spoonerism lately, or heard one from someone else? If so, share! If not...well, enjoy the new nugget of information you learned. Next time someone jumbles their words you'll know the technical term for it.
Ha! I do this all the time, in the form of an error of speech. For some reason, often in relationship to people's names: Dan and Jean sometimes comes out instead of Jan and Dean. Save and Darah for Dave and Sarah....I''m excited to know I'm not the only one!
ReplyDeleteHa, GM, I did it tonight while reading Little House to Ev. I mixed up Mary and Laura. :P
ReplyDelete