As it turns out, our perceptions don’t match. Where I heard my pauses and restarts and “um” s as deviations, others perceived them as a cool intelligence. We like how much time you spend choosing your words, people said, it makes you seem like you care about what you’re saying. I admit, I was baffled by this compliment—it seemed akin to praising a quarterback with a sprained shoulder for the quirky skew of his incomplete passes. Still, the norms that govern daily life tolerate varying types of verbal performances, and I was curious about that flexibility. For one thing, why would we be flexible in our actual speaking and listening, yet so perfectionistic and demanding when we teach or reflect on them?
The questions asked by this book spring from both personal and political listening. Why do verbal blunders happen? What do they mean? And why do they matter?
1
The Secrets of Reverend Spooner
If the world of verbal blunders were the night sky, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner of Oxford University could play the role of the North Star. Spooner, who was born in 1844, was famous for verbal blundering so incorrigible that his exploits have been immortalized in poems and songs and, most enduringly, by lending his name to a type of slip of the tongue he was unusually prone to make. In the spoonerism, sounds from two words are exchanged or reversed, resulting in a phrase that is inappropriate for the setting. For Spooner, these embarrassments ranged from wild to mild. Toasting Queen Victoria at dinner, Spooner said, “Give three cheers for our queer old dean,” and he greeted a group of farmers as “noble tons of soil.” There was the time he cautioned young missionaries against having “a half-warmed fish in their hearts.” He described Cambridge in the winter as “a bloody meek place.” Once Spooner berated a student for “fighting a liar in the quadrangle.” “You have hissed all my mystery lectures,” he reportedly said. “In fact, you have tasted two whole worms and you must leave Oxford this afternoon by the next town drain.” A spoonerism can also involve the reversal of two words, as in “Courage to blow the bears of life,” or, when saying good-bye to someone, “Must you stay, can’t you go?”
Undergraduates at Oxford University were playfully fond of Spooner, whom they nicknamed “the Spoo.” They also coined the term “spoonerism” around 1885, after Spooner had been a fellow at New College for almost twenty years. By 1892, his reputation for absentmindedness was well known; students came to New College expecting to hear a spoonerism. “Well, I’ve been up here for four years, and never heard the Spoo make a spoonerism before, and now he makes a damned rotten one at the last minute,” wrote one student. (Spooner had assured students that experience would teach them that “the weight of rages will press harder and harder upon the employer.”) Spooner himself knew of his public image. Privately he referred to his “transpositions of thought.” At the end of a speech he once gave to a group of alumni, he said, “And now I suppose I’d better sit down, or I might be saying—er—one of those things.” The scientist Julian Huxley (a New College fellow under Spooner for six years), who was present at the scene, said that the audience reacted with “perhaps the greatest applause he ever got.”
The British humor magazine Punch called Spooner “Oxford’s great metaphasiarch.”*4 Spooner’s reputation was also carried beyond Oxford and even out of England by newspapers’ joke columns, funny pages, and “quips and quirks” sections. One example of screwy language from around this time is an 1871 collection by the American writer C. C. Bombaugh, titled The Book of Blunders. Though it didn’t mention Spooner, Bombaugh’s book promised a grab bag anthology of “Hibernicisms, bulls that are not Irish and typographic errors.” In addition to slips of the printing press, Bombaugh included slips of the telegraph. A French cleric was once greeted at the train station by a funeral bier—intended for him—because the telegraph operator had mistaken Père Ligier et moi (Father Ligier and I) for Père Ligier est mort (Father Ligier is dead). One New Yorker ordered flowers from a florist in Philadelphia, telegraphing a need for “two hand bouquets,” which the telegraph clerk printed as “two hund. bouquets.” When the New Yorker refused to pay for 198 unwanted bouquets, the florist sued him and lost. Then the florist sued the telegraph company and (according to Bombaugh) won. Such were the legal liabilities of a verbal blunder. On the face of it, slurs against the Irish and accidents of typography seem to have little in common. Yet the opportunity to mock and laugh about either one neutralized the perceived threats of immigrants and technological change.*5
The public’s taste for outrageous jabberwocky may have predated Spooner, but his sayings appeared so frequently and widely that the spoonerism was known around the English-speaking world early in the twentieth century. On a visit to South Africa in 1912, Spooner said in a letter to his wife that “the Johannesburg paper had an article on my visit to Johannesburg, but of course they thought me most famous for my Spoonerisms, so I was not greatly puffed up.” In the 1920s, Spooner encountered an American woman at a concert who asked if he was Dr. Spooner. As Spooner wrote in his diary, “She replied I was the best known name in America except Mr. Hudson Shaw [sic]…to have known a celebrity, even the author of ‘Spoonerisms’ means a good deal, tho’ I explained to her that I was better known for my defects than for any merits.”*6
In all, Spooner spent almost sixty years as a member of New College, starting as a student in 1862, then as a fellow in 1867. To get the position, he had to take an oral exam, which he not only passed but excelled at. He ascended the ranks until he became warden, a sort of chaplain, from 1903 to 1924. He was married, had seven children, and lived in a sixteen-bedroom mansion staffed with eleven servants. When he was fifty-two years old, he tried to learn to ride a bicycle. (Or “a well-boiled icicle,” as he put it.) He was also a revered classics scholar and a respected school leader. He had a rare gift, said Huxley, “of making people feel that he was deeply interested in their own particular affairs.” As an albino (“not a full albino with pink eyes,” Huxley remembered, “but one with very pale blue eyes and white hair just tinged with straw color”), Spooner had horrifically poor eyesight and could read only with his eyes several inches from the page. He also spoke with a squeaky, high-pitched voice and said “uh” a lot—perhaps because he was trying to avoid making the slips he’d become famous for.
“He looked like a rabbit, but he was brave as a lion,” said the historian Arnold Toynbee. Spooner himself was more modest. “I am, I hope, to some extent a useful kind of drudge,” he wrote in a letter, “but not a ruler of men.”
Spoonerisms are the comfortable shoes of slips of the tongue: when it comes time to illustrate the universality speech errors, they’re so familiar and broken in, they always get a laugh. Far from the funny pages, though, they exhibit properties that have been observed in Latin, Croatian, German, English, Greek, and French (among other languages). Spoonerisms all work the same way: the reversed sounds come from the beginnings of the words, rarely at the ends, and very often from the syllable that carries the stress.*7 Spooner wouldn’t likely have accused a student of “righting a file in the quadrangle” or announced the hymn in chapel as “conkingering kwers their titles take.”
The scientific name for a spoonerism is an exchange, or in the Greek, metaphasis. Just as the word “Kleenex” now refers to all paper tissues, “spoonerism” serves as the blanket term for all exchanges of sounds. In general, consonants are more often transposed than vowels. As the psychologist Donald MacKay has observed, the sounds reverse across a distance no greater than a phrase, evidence that a person planning what to say next does so at about a phrase’s span in advance. Cognitively it would be nearly impossible for Spooner (or anyone else) to say something like, “For womework tonight you will read and translate the first page of Caesar’s Gallic Whores.”
We might want to distinguish the spoonerism from the more generic exchange—certainly there’s a difference between one that results in two actual words (as in, “May I sew you into a sheet?”) and one that results in nonsense (as in praying that th
e congregation would be filled with “fresh veal and new zigor”). The distinction is necessary because it raises a legitimate linguistic question: do slips of the tongue like these produce real words more frequently than they result in nonwords? The implication is that if real words (“sew you into a sheet”) are more frequent, then how our minds produce words becomes a bit clearer. Specifically, it suggests that in the rapid processes involved in thinking and speaking, a speaker inspects a word as a whole, not as a sequence of specific sounds. Thus, a word that “looks right” to the speaker—or, more precisely, to a sort of internal editor or blunder checker—will be cleared for pronouncing, like planes are cleared for takeoff. In fact, studies have shown that people tend to make more speech errors that involve individual sounds and produce legitimate words.*8
This bias for spoonerizing to produce real, not invented, words is one way that slips of the tongue, though they intrude unexpectedly, are less random than one might think. When one looks at a large group of slips, the patterns and tendencies that emerge share a strong resemblance to the language itself. For instance, in English, slips with sounds tend to produce sequences of sounds that are possible in English. Thus, while Spooner might have said that he gave someone a “poppy of his caper,” he wouldn’t have said the un-English “a ocppy of his cper.” Likewise, spoonerisms in Choctaw probably won’t sound much like those in French.
What hasn’t been determined, however, is whether the exchange that produces a spoonerism is more or less frequent than two other types of speech errors. Some scientists with an interest in slips of the tongue argue that a type of slip, an “anticipation” (as in “the American worth ethic,” a phrase not actually uttered by Spooner, though he could have) occurs more often. What we plan to say (albeit only a few seconds in the future) contaminates what we say in the present. Others disagree and report that another type of slip, a “perseveration,” (such as “the Battle in the Belgium Belch,” also not Spooner’s) happen just as often. These open questions point to a central issue in the scientific study of verbal blunders: do we more readily perceive some types of slips in our own talking or others’ while other slips wriggle by? And if so, why do we hear the ones we do? Or do we hear them all?
All of these distinctions color how we understand Reverend Spooner—and other famous verbal blunderers. The facts of Spooner’s life very strongly suggest that he didn’t make as many verbal blunders as are attributed to him. Of the blunders he did make, very few were “true” spoonerisms. The myths about the man, which were spun out of fancy and admiration, say more about our fascination with verbal blunders than about the blunders or the man.
Since the 1960s, in a search for the historical Spooner, linguists and historians have been sifting the evidence for attested examples of his errors. In an essay, “The Warden’s Wordplay,” the historian R. H. Robbins claimed Spooner made no more than three “true” spoonerisms during his life.*9 A student at New College from 1894 to 1898, taking notes during a Spooner lecture, noted that Spooner said, “So you will be abily easle to chase the train of thought.” As a guest at someone’s house, Spooner said that he’d “lately tasted a most delicious madeira when he was in Banana.” And at a meeting of the Kensington Poetry Lovers’ Circle in 1888 or 1889, he began a reading from Tennyson: “Come into the garden, Maud/for the black gnat-bite has flown.”†10
Some of Spooner’s colleagues also reported a dearth of spoonerisms. “I was almost daily meeting Dr. Spooner for some forty years from 1882 onwards,” remembered one, “and I can remember hearing hardly any of the transpositions attributed to him.” His daughter, Rosemary, claims she never heard him spoonerize at all.
According to Robbins, Spooner made far more slips of the tongue that were generic exchanges (in the sense that real words weren’t the result). He recounted several that had been observed by more than one person or verified. In chapel, Spooner once announced the hymn as “Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take” in a sermon he announced that “but now we see through a dark glassly,” and he once told a stranger, “Excuse me, but I think you are occupewing my pie.” Spooner also asked a Japanese dinner guest, “Do you practice ju-jusit?” And during a classics lecture, he referred to the figures of Irenaeus and Collypark. (He meant Polycarp.)
If the Spoo didn’t make as many true spoonerisms as were attributed to him, he did utter a slew of slips of the tongue. “He was rather a small man with a strange, rather butterfly sort of quality in his voice.” Huxley wrote, “And finally, he did say, and write, and do some very odd things.” Someone reported hearing him say that the story of Noah’s great flood was “barrowed from Bobylon.” When he officiated at a wedding he announced the bride and groom as “loifully jawned in holy matrimony.” (This has also been written as “jawfully loined,” which may be evidence of its apocryphal status.)
Robbins and other biographers do consider reliable many other instances of the Spoo’s absentminded eccentricities. Sir Charles Symonds told of the time he was instructed to visit the warden’s office urgently. When he arrived, Spooner couldn’t remember why he had summoned Symonds, so he dismissed him just as abruptly. “Well, you may go,” Spooner said.
When Spooner was interviewed in 1930, the year he died, he remembered making only the “Kinkering Congs” blunder. Robbins quoted a witness as saying, “There was a hush and the Doctor calmly repeated his slip. I am afraid that we all burst into laughter. I think the Doctor then saw his mistake.”
If Spooner was a garden-variety blunderer, why did the legend of his profuse, extravagant blundering grow so quickly? Spoonerisms are funny, of course. That Spooner was a clergyman must have contributed: the seriousness of the pulpit throws into relief the preacher who lectures on the “synospel Goptics,” or praises God as a “shoving leopard,” or describes St. John the Baptist’s “tearful chidings.” But the easy, immediate humor of the spoonerism also begs the question, Why didn’t they take some other blunderer’s name? William Hayter supposed the reason was that Spooner was affiliated with New College during a dynamic period in its history, when school leaders took a closed, stagnant place and transformed it into a more open, intellectually vibrant community. As warden, Spooner held a moderate course—not introducing any more change than his predecessors, but not returning to more traditional ways. So he may have been associated with free-floating anxieties that sought a comfortable mark. Hayter called it “ironical” that a man who was remembered, admired, and mentioned in memoirs by Arnold Toynbee, Julian Huxley, and many others is known most for “trivial absurdities, most of them apocryphal.”
Spoonerisms were also invented by students—one of them, Charles W. Baty, admitted inventing “a camel passing through the knee of an idol.” The bulk of errors attributed to Spooner were actually this kind of creative invention. But why were the verbal inventions attributed to Spooner circulated outside the university community as well? Perhaps an answer can be found by looking at what spoonerisms were called before Spooner. An early alternative was “marrowskying,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “a variety of slang, or a slip in speaking, characterized by transposition of initial letters, syllables, or parts of two words.” There are suggestions that “Marrowsky” was somehow related to Joseph Boruw-laski, a famous dwarf who toured the courts of Europe in the eighteenth century, but no attested connection has been found.*11 Scholars of English slang have also pointed to the terms “medical Greek” or “hospital Greek,” a verbal game created by medical students in London in order to disguise ordinary English, a sort of pig Latin that involved reversing the sounds of pairs of words.
Spooner came along at a time when the archetype of the blunderer was changing from someone who blundered deliberately to someone who did so accidentally. “Marrowskying” named a deformation of language by a person who wanted to get laughs. An utterance out of the mouth of Spooner? It was accidental, a moment in which self-control not only failed but whose very existence came into question. There was an aspect of social class to the sp
oonerism as well; until the late nineteenth century, the famous blunderers of literature (think Sancho Panza of Don Quixote or Dogberry of Much Ado About Nothing) had been either peasants, incompetents, or fools. Reverend Spooner embodies an emerging figure of modernity as much as an icon of verbal blundering: the educated, upstanding citizen who suffered inexplicable accidents in public.
In its earliest days the science of psychology tried to understand the nature of self-control and its relationship to consciousness. The human self had once been conceived as autonomous and the center of its world. The individual’s challenge was to know one’s self and the divine power that granted free will. But experiments in perception and consciousness demonstrated that the bulk of mental life occurred without our awareness. Self-knowledge would not always lead to self-control. One could be fully self-knowing and still make speech errors; one could also be highly educated and fall prey to accidents.
Around the time that spoonerisms became popular, technological systems, such as railroads, were becoming larger and more complex and hence harder to coordinate. In these circumstances, small human errors had larger consequences. In 1889, an article in Scribner’s on railway management mentioned the term “heterophemy,” which American writer Richard Grant White had given to moments when someone thinks one thing yet says, thinks, or does another. The writer described one incident in which a dozen lives were lost when a train operator became heterophemous.
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