Um. . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

Chapter 1: The Secrets of Reverend Spooner If the world of verbal blunders were the night sky, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner of Oxford University could play the role of the North Star. Spooner, who was born in 1844, was famous for verbal blundering so incorrigible that his exploits have been immortalized in poems and songs and, most enduringly, by lending his name to a type of slip of the tongue he was unusually prone to make. In the spoonerism, sounds from two words are exchanged or reversed, resulting in a phrase that is inappropriate for the setting. For Spooner, these embarrassments ranged from wild to mild. Toasting Queen Victoria at dinner, Spooner said, "Give three cheers for our queer old dean," and he greeted a group of farmers as "noble tons of soil." There was the time he cautioned young missionaries against having "a half-warmed fish in their hearts." He described Cambridge in the winter as "a bloody meek place." Once Spooner berated a student for "fighting a liar in the quadrangle." "You have hissed all my mystery lectures," he reportedly said. "In fact, you have tasted two whole worms and you must leave Oxford this afternoon by the next town drain." A spoonerism can also involve the reversal of two words, as in "Courage to blow the bears of life," or, when saying good-bye to someone, "Must you stay, can't you go?" Undergraduates at Oxford University were playfully fond of Spooner, whom they nicknamed "the Spoo." They also coined the term "spoonerism" around 1885, after Spooner had been a fellow at New College for almost twenty years. By 1892, his reputation for absentmindedness was well known; students came to New College expecting to hear a spoonerism. "Well, I've been up here for four years, and never heard the Spoo make a spoonerism before, and now he makes a damned rotten one at the last minute," wrote one student. (Spooner had assured students that experience would teach them that "the weight of rages will press harder and harder upon the employer.") Spooner himself knew of his public image. Privately he referred to his "transpositions of thought." At the end of a speech he once gave to a group of alumni, he said, "And now I suppose I'd better sit down, or I might be sayingerone of those things." The scientist Julian Huxley (a New College fellow under Spooner for six years), who was present at the scene, said that the audience reacted with "perhaps the greatest applause he ever got." The British humor magazinePunchcalled Spooner "Oxford's great metaphasiarch."[1] Spooner's reputation was also carried beyond Oxford and even out of England by newspapers' joke columns, funny pages, and "quips and quirks" sections. One example of screwy language from around this time is an 1871 collection by the American writer C. C. Bombaugh, titledThe Book of Blunders. Though it didn't mention Spooner, Bombaugh's book promised a grab bag anthology of "Hibernicisms, bulls that are not Irish and typographic errors." In addition to slips of the printing press, Bombaugh included slips of the telegraph. A French cleric was once greeted at the train station by a funeral bierintended for himbecause the telegraph operator had mistakenPere Ligier et moi(Father Ligier and I) forPere Ligier est mort(Father Ligier is dead). One New Yorker ordered flowers from a florist in Philadelphia, telegraphing a need for "two hand bouquets," which the telErard, Michael is the author of 'Um. . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375423567 and ISBN 0375423567.