Every now and then, it's my job to tell you something odd and interesting about myself. So, today, I tell you this: I love Spoonerisms.
Spoonerisms (so named for Reverend William Archibald Spooner, 1844–1930, who exemplified the quirk) occur when one transposes the initial sounds of a group of words, sometimes forming new ones, (e.g., sly gap --> guy slap.) My favorites are the ones that add new meaning or commentary to the original.
The thing is, I'm doing this constantly. As I'm shopping, I reach for a packet of bound grief at the meat display. When Deborah requests that I be on dish duty, I ponder whether I should wash dishes or dash wishes. Some of them even make it out of my head, like telling a giggling Fiona that we should have named her "Sue Tilley."
Over the years, I've been mentally gathering material for a story where one of the main characters talks in nothing but Spoonerisms, and, at the end, says something completely normal, which, no one realizes until it's almost too late, was another Spoonerism, setting the scene for the final climactic actiony bit. (The setting is, of course, a greasy spoon...er.)
So, that's one quirky thing that's always going on in my head. What's going on in yours?
3 comments:
I get really bad deja vu so I spend a lot of time in my head trying to remember what came next in deja vu moments. The fun part? I usually can...weird.
One of our favorites, when traveling out west: we would point to a field of leafy greens and say, "Hey, kids, see the bugger sheets?"
When American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) appeared in the late 1960's they included the division sign (/) and the reverse of the division sign (\). I was speaking to the Director of Research at the company where I worked when I called it the slackward bash.
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