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 saying-er-one 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 magazine Punch called Spooner “Oxford’s great
metaphasiarch.” 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, titled The 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 bier-intended
for him-because the telegraph operator had mistaken Père Ligier et moi (Father
Ligier and I) for Père 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 telegraph clerk printed as “two hund. bouquets.” When
the New Yorker refused to pay for 198 unwanted bouquets, the florist sued him
and lost. Then the florist sued the telegraph company and (according to
Bombaugh) won. Such were the legal liabilities of a verbal blunder. On the face
of it, slurs against the Irish and accidents of typography seem to have little
in common. Yet the opportunity to mock and laugh about either one neutralized
the perceived threats of immigrants and technological change.
The public’s taste for outrageous jabberwocky may have predated Spooner, but his
sayings appeared so frequently and widely that the spoonerism was known around
the English-speaking world early in the twentieth century. On a visit to South
Africa in 1912, Spooner said in a letter to his wife that “the Johannesburg
paper had an article on my visit to Johannesburg, but of course they thought me
most famous for my Spoonerisms, so I was not greatly puffed up.” In the 1920s,
Spooner encountered an American woman at a concert who asked if he was Dr.
Spooner. As Spooner wrote in his diary, “She replied I was the best known name
in America except Mr. Hudson Shaw [sic] … to have known a celebrity, even
the author of ‘Spoonerisms’ means a good deal, tho’ I explained to her that I
was better known for my defects than for any merits.”
In all, Spooner spent almost sixty years as a member of New College, starting as
a student in 1862, then as a fellow in 1867. To get the position, he had to take
an oral exam, which he not only passed but excelled at. He ascended the ranks
until he became warden, a sort of chaplain, from 1903 to 1924. He was married,
had seven children, and lived in a sixteen-bedroom mansion staffed with eleven
servants. When he was fifty-two years old, he tried to learn to ride a bicycle.
(Or “a well-boiled icicle,” as he put it.) He was also a revered classics
scholar and a respected school leader. He had a rare gift, said Huxley, “of
making people feel that he was deeply interested in their own particular
affairs.” As an albino (“not a full albino with pink eyes,” Huxley remembered,
“but one with very pale blue eyes and white hair just tinged with straw color”),
Spooner had horrifically poor eyesight and could read only with his eyes several
inches from the page. He also spoke with a squeaky, high-pitched voice and said
“uh” a lot-perhaps because he was trying to avoid making the slips he’d become
famous for.
“He looked like a rabbit, but he was brave as a lion,” said the historian Arnold
Toynbee. Spooner himself was more modest. “I am, I hope, to some extent a useful
kind of drudge,” he wrote in a letter, “but not a ruler of men.”
Spoonerisms are the comfortable shoes of slips of the tongue: when it comes time
to illustrate the universality speech errors, they’re so familiar and broken in,
they always get a laugh. Far from the funny pages, though, they exhibit
properties that have been observed in Latin, Croatian, German, English, Greek,
and French (among other languages). Spoonerisms all work the same way: the
reversed sounds come from the beginnings of the words, rarely at the ends, and
very often from the syllable that carries the stress. Spooner wouldn’t likely
have accused a student of “righting a file in the quadrangle” or announced the
hymn in chapel as “conkingering kwers their titles take.”
The scientific name for a spoonerism is an exchange, or in the Greek,
metaphasis. Just as the word “Kleenex” now refers to all paper tissues,
“spoonerism” serves as the blanket term for all exchanges of sounds. In general,
consonants are more often transposed than vowels. As the psychologist Donald
MacKay has observed, the sounds reverse across a distance no greater than a
phrase, evidence that a person planning what to say next does so at about a
phrase’s span in advance. Cognitively it would be nearly impossible for Spooner
(or anyone else) to say something like, “For womework tonight you will read and
translate the first page of Caesar’s Gallic Whores.”
We might want to distinguish the spoonerism from the more generic
exchange-certainly there’s a difference between one that results in two actual
words (as in, “May I sew you into a sheet?”) and one that results in nonsense
(as in praying that the congregation would be filled with “fresh veal and new
zigor”). The distinction is necessary because it raises a legitimate linguistic
question: do slips of the tongue like these produce real words more frequently
than they result in nonwords? The implication is that if real words (“sew you
into a sheet”) are more frequent, then how our minds produce words becomes a bit
clearer. Specifically, it suggests that in the rapid processes involved in
thinking and speaking, a speaker inspects a word as a whole, not as a sequence
of specific sounds. Thus, a word that “looks right” to the speaker-or, more
precisely, to a sort of internal editor or blunder checker-will be cleared for
pronouncing, like planes are cleared for takeoff. In fact, studies have shown
that people tend to make more speech errors that involve individual sounds and
produce legitimate words.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Um …
by Michael Erard
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Erard.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Pantheon
Copyright © 2007
Michael Erard
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ISBN: 978-0-375-42356-7
