Spoonerisms, and How to Compose Them
Introduction
The Spoonerism is named after William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), an eccentric British clergyman and academic who became famous for his transposition of the first few letters of adjacent words - e.g. 'a well oiled bicycle' = 'a well boiled icicle'.
How to Compose Simple Spoonerisms
Although it is easy to 'spoonerise' any word pair directly swapping the heads of the words, e.g. 'bright flash' readily spoonerises to 'flight brash', the results of such operations are often meaningless gibberish - geaningless mibberish. Whilst this might be a useful device in some situations, for example in nonsense verse, 'meaningful' Spoonerisms - in which the spoonerised form is in regular English words - are rather more difficult to devise in a random fashion. However, given some imagination it is possible to write these forms systematically, and the results being in regular English, the scope for humour and double meaning is vastly improved: the detailed method is given in a stepwise form below.
The Method
1) choose a word you wish to include in your Spoonerism (example: 'book')
2) find a word that rhymes with it - and does not start with the same letter(s) (example: 'cook')
3) find a word that has some vague relationship with the first word, that begins with the first letter(s) of the rhyming word but does not rhyme with it (example: 'case')
4) find the fourth word by taking word three and substituting the first letter with the first letter of word one (example base)
5) if the word in step 4) doesn't fit, return to step 3) and try again
6) the Spoonerism is now complete: you may wish to vary the word order (it will automatically rhyme) before constructing a sentence with it (example: book case = cook base, or case book = base cook)
7) although the example shown is for simple monosyllabic words, the process will work for longer words and phrases: use a rhyming dictionary to find a good selection of rhymes for step 2)
8) be prepared to accept mis-spellings in your Spoonerisms: they are usually acceptable to the listener provided the phonetic version of the word form is acceptable, and can be adjusted in the written form.
Some Sample Spoonerisms
fair deal/dare feel, walking tall/talking wall, lyrics hire/hysterics liar, Korea soaps/so near copes, crime team/time cream, green scope/scene grope, given hold/heaven gold, cat fur/fat cur, daughter crying/caught her drying, cleaning lamps/leaning clamps, dictionary pile/pictionary dial, learning speeches/spurning leeches, versatile/terse and vile, wild talk/tiled walk, Ford soccer/scored Fokker, drug brain/bug drain, how not/now hot, snooker table/took her sable, diving scope/skiving dope, groaning brief/boning grief, cold butter/bold cutter, coffee top/toffee cop
Spoonerisms in Action
These devices spring to life when they are inserted in prose to brighten it up a bit - often humorously. There are basically two ways of doing this:
a) by showing both the original word group and its spoonerised form (in an X and/or Y form)
b) by entirely deleting the original phrase and substituting the spoonerised version: this makes the reader, or listener, work hard to decode the meaning using the available clues of rhyme, rhythm and context.
There follows a short tale that employs both these devices:
...The Singing Wongs were a harmony trio from China. One day, after some wild talk on a tiled walk - during which they argued about who had cooked a bar - Mr Wong, a versatile, terse and vile tenor told junior Wong, the cook and bass, that the booking case was his fault and that he was Wong.
'Ancient proverb,' said Mr Wong, 'Two fools and few tools cause tearing whales and wearing tales'
Junior Wong, who's first name was How, wasn't impressed: we has boo tizzy mixing colt butter with his bolt cutter and he said nothing since he was now hot and knew how not to get embroiled.
Later that evening, the Singing Wongs were winging songs and all talking wall when Lee Wong, Wong senior's daughter, wan off reaping into the dressing room. With his daughter crying, Wong caught her drying her eyes on a towel.
'What wong, Wong?' he asked.
'I have rare habit with hair of rabbit and cat fur, fat cur. I no go on.'
'How wong this go on?'
'Yen tears.'
'If your jokes fail, you go to folks jail: they take away Japan toys and treppan joys. You no longer travel with group, but join gravel troupe and study genealogy droop with demonology group. What you they to sat?'
How interjected and sonsoled his cister. 'Not all bid, Sas,' see head softly, 'we give you diet training and try it draining bad feeling away. You soon heal rumour that humor real.'
And it came to pass that in one brief summer on dogs food that key shame out of the fogs dude - and they all lived happily ever after.
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Ambiguities
Spare
