Spooner did transpose items, but not like this - his inversions were more often of whole words or of ideas rather than sounds. A reliable witness records him repeatedly referring to a friend of a Dr Child as "Dr Friend's child". He did things backwards sometimes. One story - well attested - recounts how he spilled some salt during a college dinner and carefully poured some claret on it to mop it up, a reversal of the usual process. He is also said to have remarked on the poor lighting of some stairs and then to have turned off the lights and attempted to lead his party downstairs in the dark.
Wordplay of the type we now call Spoonerisms was rife among Oxford undergraduates from about the middle of the nineteenth century. Spooner was very well known in the small community of Oxford. He was instantly recognisable, since he was an albino, with the pale face, pink eyes, poor eyesight, white hair and small stature that is characteristic of his type. (Some writers have suggested his verbal and physical quirks may have been linked with his albinism, perhaps a form of what is now called dyspraxia.) Spooner later became famous for his verbal and conceptual inversions, so it's easy to see how his name could have become linked to products of undergraduate wordplay. This seems to have been from affection rather than malice, since Spooner (known as the Spoo) was kindly and well-liked.
Spooner was an excellent lecturer, speaker and administrator who did much to transform New College into a modern institution. But he was no great scholar, and it's a cruel twist of fate that he is now only remembered for a concept he largely had foisted upon him
The only Spoonerisms I commit are with my bereal sowl.
I don’t understand the whole British College thing. If one believes contemporary film, a person’s entire worth in Britain is determined by which college at Oxford or Cambridge one attended. Sort of like New England in the US. Outside New England, no one gives a rat’s a$$ where you went to school, it’s who you cheer for in the playoffs and in Nascar.
4
Mood Gorning to you, too.
i thought that was a team from OK, the Spooners?
Morning (I think)
My homework:
Don’t go around tonight,
Well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bathroom on the right.
Home from work and hoping it will not rain any more until I get the grill lighted for pork chops-
To make a spoonerism
Refer to McInsane-
His collusion with fat Ted
Causes everyone pain
I suppose he thinks he can
Play both sides of the fence
He really needs to bet some Gauls
And stop being so dense
His stupid stance on shamesty
Is really quite the show-
Someone needs to take a fist
And strike him a blushing crow