A hymn announced in New College chapel in 1879 as 'Kinquering congs their titles take' (1879)
The one example the Warden is generally agreed to have actually produced
General knowledge · Words & language
Spoonerisms
Named after a don who died in 1930
Wordplay — the initial sounds change places
Slips of the tongue in which the opening sounds of two nearby words swap over, turning a well-oiled bicycle into a well-boiled icicle. They are named after William Archibald Spooner, an albino clergyman who was Warden of New College, Oxford, and who lent his name to a genre of jokes he mostly did not produce: generations of undergraduates invented examples and attributed them to him. He is said to have acknowledged only one. Psycholinguists take the real thing seriously, because the swaps show how speech is planned in advance.
How to spot them
- ▸New College, Oxford, and a warden with poor eyesight and a very quick mind
- ▸Initial consonants trading places between two nearby words
- ▸Most of the famous examples are undergraduate inventions
- ▸The Two Ronnies and Ronnie Barker's Pismonouncers Unanimous
Key facts
'You have hissed all my mystery lectures and tasted a whole worm'
Attributed to him when sending down an undergraduate; almost certainly invented
'The Lord is a shoving leopard'
A pulpit example of the apocryphal sort
A toast to the monarch that came out as 'our queer old dean'
Queen Victoria was intended; again, an undergraduate's invention
'A well-boiled icicle' for a well-oiled bicycle
Perhaps the most quoted specimen of the whole genre
Its namesake was an albino, short-sighted and small, and held his Oxford wardenship from 1903 to 1924
William Archibald Spooner, 1844–1930, ordained and lecturer in history, philosophy and divinity
The Two Ronnies built sketches around them, including a society for pismonouncers
Ronnie Barker's monologues for 'Pismonouncers Unanimous'
Shel Silverstein wrote a whole children's book in them, about a rabbit whose name is itself one (2005)
Runny Babbit, published posthumously
Key ideas
- Genuine slips of this kind are evidence that a speaker plans several words ahead. The sounds that swap are almost always in the same position in their respective syllables, and the result is almost always a possible word of the language, which suggests the error happens after the sounds are selected but before they are spoken.
Quick-fire facts
- •William Archibald Spooner lived from 1844 to 1930 and was Warden of New College, Oxford, from 1903 to 1924
- •He was an albino with weak sight, and was ordained; he lectured in ancient history, philosophy and divinity
- •The word was current as Oxford slang by about 1900, well before his death
- •He is reported to have admitted to only one authentic example, the hymn announcement of 1879
- •Linguists class the error as metathesis, and more precisely as a phonological exchange error
- •Freud treated slips of the tongue as revealing in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901); the German term is Versprecher
- •The French equivalent, the contrepèterie, is a deliberate literary form rather than an accident
- •Rabelais used the device in Pantagruel in 1532 — femme folle à la messe for femme molle à la fesse
- •The American radio announcer Harry von Zell famously introduced Herbert Hoover as 'Hoobert Heever'
- •Their opposite number in the classification of speech errors is the malapropism, where a whole word is substituted
Drill it — 7 cards
1 / 7new card
Sources
- David Crystal — Language Play
- Julia Cresswell — The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins