General Washington and Reverend Spooner

Although yesterday was Presidents’ Day, today is actually what my mother called George Birthington’s Wash-day. 

I don’t mean to imply that she always called it that, but she heard someone, accidentally or not, call it that when she was a child, and it stuck.  She actually had difficulty saying George Washington’s Birthday correctly.

It seems that once you get your tangue tongled around a Spoonerism, it takes hold of your brain and won’t let go.

Spoonerisms are named after the Reverend W. A. Spooner (1844-1930) who was Dean and Warden of New College in Oxford, England. He is reputed to have made these verbal slips frequently. His most famous may have occurred when, during a chapel service, he referred to Jesus Christ as our "”shoving leopard.”

Spoonerisms are words or phrases in which letters or syllables get swapped. This often happens accidentally in slips of the tongue.  The Greeks had a word for this type of impediment long before Spooner was born: metathesis. It means the act of switching things around.

Reverend Spooner's tendency to get words and sounds crossed up could happen at any time, but especially when he was agitated. He reprimanded one student for"fighting a liar in the quadrangle" and another who "hissed my mystery lecture." To the latter he added in disgust, "You have tasted two worms."

So if you have made a verbal slip, don’t worry, you’re not alone. John Lennon was once quoted as saying in an interview that “time wounds all heels.” Radio announcer Harry Von Zell once introduced the president as Hoobert Heever, and another network  announcer – can’t remember his name - once said during a visit to the US by Queen Elizabeth ( not Elizabeth II, the Queen mother)  that her arrival at the White House would be greeted by a “21 son galoot.”