by Mike Gray

No doubt you’ve heard of the “spoonerism,” named for

. . . . the Reverend Dr. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930). Spooner attended New College, Oxford, as an undergraduate in 1862, and remained there for over 60 years in various capacities, ultimately as warden (equivalent to the U.S. president of a college).

He published little of significance but was highly respected. Students and colleagues remembered him with affection, and their memoirs portray him as intelligent and wise, stern but kind, the model of the kindly Oxford don.

But unintentional word mixups—mostly malapropisms, really—remain Spooner’s main claim to fame, a distinction he would gladly have avoided:

We know that he did, certainly, make a few unintended transpositions. But the legend grew rapidly and overtook the reality, and so he is credited (blamed?) for a huge number of slips that he probably did not commit.

One of his students said, decades later, “I was always hoping to hear him utter a spoonerism, but never did.”

Ironically, most of the slips that we can attribute to Spooner with certainty were not word transpositions so much as malapropisms, absent-minded blunders and inverted logic. For example:

•He once called a famous Irish play “The Ploughboy of the Western World.”

•At dinner, he attempted to clean up spilled salt by pouring wine on it (reversal of the usual procedure.)

•After meeting a widow, he remarked to a friend that it was very sad, “her late husband was eaten by missionaries.”

Witnesses claimed they heard Spooner say, “The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer,” “in a dark, glassly,” and “chase the train of thought.” One reasonably authentic account says that he introduced Dr. Child’s friend as “Dr. Friend’s child.” Spooner himself admitted to only one spoonerism, announcing the hymn “Conquering Kings Their Titles Take” as “Kinkering Congs.”

(These excerpts were taken from a 2002 article by Dex on The Straight Dope website.)

Poor Spooner’s errors were unintentional, but there have been some folks whose “mistakes” were quite deliberate, for example, Stoopnagle and Bud on radio and Archie Campbell (here and here) and Ronnie Barker on TV.