tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed May 06 21:15:39 1998

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Re: MO about fork and spoon

Yeah, this is off-topic, but I really get a kick out of it.

<<Begin quote from _The Mother Tongue_ by Bill Bryson, pp. 233-234>>

    All of these were created for comic effect in plays and novels, but
sometimes it comes naturally, as with that most famous of word muddlers, the
Reverend William Spooner, warden of New College at Oxford University from
1903 to 1924, whose habitual transposition of sounds—metaphasis is the
technical term—made him famous in his own lifetime and gave the world a
word: spoonerism.  A little-known fact about Spooner was that he was an
albino.  He was also famously boring, a shortcoming that he himself
acknowledged when he wrote plaintively of his sermons in his diary: "They
are so apt to be dull."  In a profile in the London Echo in 1905, the
reporter noted that Spooner "has been singularly unsuccessful in making any
decided impression upon his own college."  But his most outstanding
characteristic was his facility for turning phrases on their heads.  Among
the more famous utterances invariably attributed to him are "Which of us has
not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?" and, to a delinquent
undergraduate: "You have hissed my mystery lectures.  You have tasted a
whole worm.  You will leave Oxford on the next town drain."  At an
optician's he is said to have asked, "Have you a signifying glass?"  and
when told they did not, replied, "Oh, well, it doesn't magnify."  But as his
biographer William Hayter notes, Spooner became so well-known for these
transpositions that it is sometimes impossible to know which he really said
and which were devised in his name.  He is known to have said "in a dark
glassly" and to have announced at a wedding ceremony that a couple were now
"loifully jawned," but it is altogether possible that he actually said very
few of the spoonerisms attributed to him and that the genuine utterances
weren't nearly as comical as those he was credited with, like the almost
certainly apocryphal "Please sew me to another sheet.  Someone is occupewing
my pie."
    What is certain is that Spooner suffered from a kind of metaphasis of
thought, if not always of word.  These are generally well attributed.
Outside the New College chapel he rebuked a student by saying: "I thought
you read the lesson badly today."
    "But, Sir, I didn't read the lesson," protested the student.
    "Ah," said Spooner, "I thought you didn't," and walked on.
    On another occasion he approached a fellow don and said, "Do come to
dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson."
    The man answered, "But, Warden, I am Casson."
    To which Spooner replied, "Never mind, come all the same."
    Another colleague once received a note from Spooner asking him to come
to his office the next morning on a matter of urgency.  At the bottom there
was a P.S. saying that the matter had now been resolved and the colleague
needn't bother coming at all.
    Spooner well knew his reputation for bungling speech and hated it.  Once
when a group of drunken students called at his window for him to make a
speech, he answered testily, "You don't want to hear me make a speech.  You
just hope I'll say one of those . . . things."

<<End quote, hope you didn't think it too long or out of place.>>

SuStel
Stardate 98346.8

-----Original Message-----
From: William H. Martin <[email protected]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
Date: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: MO about fork and spoon


>Perhaps Qov's post already explained this for you or maybe you
>don't know what a spoonerism is. Most dictionaries will tell
>you. As I remember, Rev. Spooner's most famous example was
>"Someone is occupewing my pie," which is, in fact, not quite a
>spoonerism as we now know them. A better example is "You hissed
>the mystery lesson." or baghneQ, apparently...
>
>charghwI'
>

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