Dooner’s Spay, I Mean . . .

Spooner’s Day, is named for Rev. William Archibald Spooner, b. 1844, Dean and later Warden of New College in Oxford. This article from Reader’s Digest describes Spooner :

Spooner was an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight, and a head too large for his body. His reputation was that of a genial, kindly, hospitable man. He seems also to have been something of an absent-minded professor. He once invited a faculty member to tea “to welcome our new archaeology Fellow.”
“But, sir,” the man replied, “I am our new archaeology Fellow.”
“Never mind,” Spooner said, “Come all the same.”

He was most famous, however, for getting his tang tungled. Spoonerisms are words or phrases in which sounds or syllables get swapped. Some of Spooner’s spoonerisms:
fighting a liar–lighting a fire
you hissed my mystery lecture–you missed my history lecture
cattle ships and bruisers–battle ships and cruisers
nosey little cook–cosy little nook
a blushing crow–a crushing blow
tons of soil–sons of toil
our queer old Dean–our dear old Queen
we’ll have the hags flung out–we’ll have the flags hung out

GWB’s most famous spoonerism:
“If the terriers and bariffs (barriers and tariffs) are torn down, this economy will grow.” (January 7, 2001 in Rochester, New York)

And here, for your further enjoyment, is the spoonerized fairy tale, Prinderella and the Cince. We used to have an old recording of Andy Griffith telling a spoonerized version of this story, not this same one, though, as I remember it. On the other side of the record was Griffith’s monologue called “What It Was Was Football” about a country boy who gets trapped into watching a football game. He can’t figure out why all those boys on the field are fighting over that little pumpkin and in all the excitement the narrator “dropped his Big Orange drink.”

Anyway, anybody else have any examples of spoonerisms?

5 thoughts on “Dooner’s Spay, I Mean . . .

  1. I once read “I’m soing to gleep” in a Donald Duck comic and for some reason it stuck in my brain.

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  3. Our family favorite is when I was a young child, I repeated what I thought I had heard my grandmother say, “Poor feet sake!” It still gets giggles from my mom!

  4. To my chagrin, I do this all the time. And then I say, “Oops, I got my twords wisted.” It always gets a laugh.

  5. Hey, Semicolon, I guess that would be the definition of a Spoonerism, spoken in a Spoonerism, wouldn’t it? Getting your ‘twords wisted.’

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