Not all the punch lines here are
spoonerisms, strictly defined; a couple are word reversals.
When I researched my
spoonerism book, Cruel and Unusual Puns, in the late '80s, I recalled those routines from performances I had attended while in Washington on business.
His linguistic view is that at the origin of the mechanisms involved in the 'deviant' utterances presented above is "an unconscious mechanical breakdown of the articulatory process."3 His line of reasoning was later developed by many other researchers who did not limit themselves to collecting
spoonerisms as they happened spontaneously, but managed to test their production experimentally.
Spoonerisms, where the first letter of words are mixed, such as, "I'm not a mar, cadam," for "I'm not a car, madam."
When you transpose (exchange) sounds in two or more words, you create a
spoonerism. Can you figure out what the speaker really meant to say in the expressions below?
It has been rendered into English as a perfect
Spoonerism ("the more obscene the better") as "Copper for stunts." Examples of such linguistic ingenuity demonstrated by the translator could be cited almost endlessly, and the English text is as enjoyable as the original.
In European languages figures of speech are generally classified in five major categories: (1) figures of resemblance or relationship (e.g., simile, metaphor, kenning, conceit, parallelism, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, and euphemism); (2) figures of emphasis or understatement (e.g., hyperbole, litotes, rhetorical question, antithesis, climax, bathos, paradox, oxymoron, and irony); (3) figures of sound (e.g., alliteration, repetition, anaphora, and onomatopoeia); (4) verbal games and gymnastics (e.g., pun and anagram); and (5) errors (e.g., malapropism, periphrasis, and
spoonerism).
IT'S a silly sort of mental
spoonerism but Farley Jackmaster Funk and Grandmaster Flash, in my addled Swiss-cheese grey matter, warped over time to become one and the same.
The Trade Marks Examiner ruled that "Nuckin Futs" was an "obvious
spoonerism" and deemed it ineligible for registration under section 42 of the Trade Marks Act.
If you saw Biffy Clyro (the name is a drunken
spoonerism of 'Cliff Richard's biro') at the inaugural The Full Ponty Festival last year, you will have seen a band re-energised, pummelling angular guitars with wild technical brilliance into songs that defied indifference.
spoonerism Reversal of the initial letters or syllables of two or more words, such as "I have a half-warmed fish in my mind" (for "half-formed wish") and "a blushing crow" (for "a crushing blow").