The Brit who is treasured for the way he mangled language
A child might look twice at the title of Shel Silverstein’s story Runny Babbit and ask, with some justification, what a “babbit” is. But by the subtitle, A Billy Sook, all is clear. Without much direction, the reader twigs that reading this silly book will involve switching the sounds at the beginnings of pairs of words.
So it is in crosswords: Take Patrick Berry’s 2011 puzzle in which “handle with care” becomes CANDLEWITHHAIR and “letterbox” BETTERLOCKS. And in British crosswords, that delight in nonsense goes at least double.
If the clues in a British crossword appear to be the kind of gobbledygook from which only a masochist could derive the slightest pleasure, it might help to bear in mind that Britain is a place that has made a heroic institution of an otherwise little-known cleric for a kind of speech impediment.
That cleric was the Reverend William Archibald Spooner—indeed, Berry’s puzzle is a little fantasia in which we imagine Rev. Spooner as a new employee of the USPS—but he was not the first to mangle words in this distinctive manner.
In his 1865 dictionary of slang, John Hotten writes about a “disagreeable nonsense” then in vogue among medical students at London University.
The waggish undergraduate habit of referring to a mutton chop as a “chutton mop” and a pint of stout as a “stint of pout” was named “the Gower Street dialect” after the university’s location; before this, such mangled phrases were known as “marrowskies,” apparently after a violin-playing Polish count who was two and a half feet tall and amused upper-class women with the same kind of wordplay. However, in 1879, as soon as Dr. Spooner introduced a hymn as “Kinqering kongs their titles take,” his fate was sealed. His students began to refer to him as “the Spoo” and awaited his every gaffe with gusto.
It was a long wait: In fact, Dr. Spooner did not perpetrate many eponymous isms. His biographers and students of language have been unable to verify “The Lord is a shoving leopard,” “Three cheers for the queer old dean,” or “The half-warmed fish in your hearts.” “You have hissed all my mystery lectures, tasted the whole worm, and must leave by the next town drain”? Far, far too good to be true. Even some of the slips of the tongue that are reliably reported have been tidied up for greater effect: His announcement that a bride and groom had been “loifully jawned in holy matrimony” became in legend the more powerful “jawfully loined.” The current edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is happy only with the disappointing “weight of rages.” As the 1928 New York Times headline put it, SPOONERISMS WERE FAKED—OXFORD DEAN’S ALLEGED LINGUAL SLIPS INVENTED BY STUDENTS.
So it’s tricky not to pity the Spoo. Already an awkward enough fellow that he absentmindedly poured claret onto a pile of spilled salt (that one does have a reliable witness), he was unable to deliver a lecture on Tacitus or William of Wykeham without feeling that the undergraduates were hoping he might twist a phrase or two to rude or amusing effect. The rambunctious Maurice Bowra recalled in his memoirs:
Once after a bump-supper we serenaded him and stood outside his window calling for a speech. He put his head out and said, “You don’t want a speech. You only want me to say one of those things,” and immediately withdrew.
In 1912 Spooner visited South Africa and wrote home to his wife: “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.”
So why is it now the spoonerism rather than the gowerism or the marrowsky? One difference is that the medical students and the count were deliberately playing games with language, while Spooner’s isms were, in myth and in reality, accidental. Unintended slips of the tongue are funny in a different way, suggesting a cheering, if fanciful, way of looking at the man. If Dr. Spooner is not to be remembered for his scholarship or his guardianship of New College, then, rather than as an embarrassment, we should think of him as the embodiment of the unconscious bleeding out into the social—a subversive figure who reveals what can happen when language breaks down.
It is not just the Brits who are taken with spoonerisms; a more intellectual approach is taken by the French with what they call the contrepet. The early French surrealists deliberately switched syllables in their prose to attack the idea that words and sentences have fixed meanings. Marcel Duchamp’s “Esquivons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots exquis” has a surface meaning of sorts (“Let’s dodge the bruising of Eskimos with exquisite words”), but its real intent is to force the reader to make fleeting connections that would otherwise seem irrational between Eskimos and language, language and the body, the body and Eskimos . . . and so on. Once you unshackle sounds from their apparent meaning, your mind is better able to question the so-called order of the world around you, which, in the experience of the surrealists, had just proved its own nonsensicality in four years of world war. Being French, they also found wordplay très amusant.
The descendants of the surrealists, the experimental writers of Oulipo (the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature), were equally fond of the device. Luc Étienne’s book The Art of the Spoonerism, recalled that, during the Occupation, Parisians “took a special pleasure in seeing under Métropolitain in their sad underground stations the sacrilegious inscription ‘Pétain mollit trop’”—“Pétain is getting too soft.” For Étienne, this is as good an example as any of the subversive potential of the spoonerism: “a weapon of freedom.”
The memoirs of Resistance secret agent Colonel Rémy take a similar joy in recalling how he arranged for the “prudish” BBC to broadcast French-language radio messages across the Channel, unaware that they contained scurrilous spoonerisms to cheer up the occupied, such as “Duce, tes gladiateurs circulent dans le sang!” The Beeb “would have shuddered at the mere thought of its airwaves being used to disseminate such imagery.” It’s safe to say that, in the 1940s, the BBC had never broadcast anything quite as rude. I would advise the sensitive francophone reader to skip to the next paragraph; for the rest of you, the phrase can be translated as “Mussolini, your gladiators are bloodstained,” but also despoonerized to “Duce, tes gladiateurs s’enculent dans le cirque” (“your gladiators fuck one another in the circus”), a salty allusion to the decadent days of Rome.
In linguistics, too, the spoonerism is more than a passing slip of the tongue. Even though they’re emitted in error, reported spoonerisms share many characteristics; they even seem to have a structure. The affected words are always close together, and one of the affected syllables is the one that would be stressed in the correct version of the utterance. More often than not, the swap involves an adjective and a noun; more often than by chance, the spoonerized phrase consists of two real words, however nonsensical they are in context. And when the spoonerized words are not real words, they usually sound as if they could be.
Crossword fans are used to the experience of being baffled by a clue but knowing some of the letters in an answer thanks to those that cross with it. If you think that the answer is a word you haven’t heard before, it’s a question of making up words in your head that fit. You concoct something plausibly pronounceable that sounds like other words—which seems to be the kind of thing that’s taking place at great speed in spoonerisms. A spoonerized phrase might lack literal meaning, but it’s never rhythmically clumsy: There’s poetry in the poppycock. You might find that you’ve said the phrase “a picky truzzle” but not “a wosscrurd”: Even your errors are made up of words that are real, or could be in your language.
That’s why the best-loved spoonerisms are those that work just as well as the intended phrase, and why the spoonerism lives on in humor and in puzzles. The long-running British sketch show The Two Ronnies repeatedly exploited its scurrilous potential, producing lines such as “The rutting season for tea cozies” and “You’re much too titty to be a preacher,” just as Dr. Spooner’s students did two generations earlier.
In the crossword century, constructors were not slow to pick up on the potential for puzzles in spoonerisms, and solvers are nowadays asked to come up with spoonerized phrases and reverse engineer the answer. One of the creators of the cryptic crossword, the poet and translator Edward Powys Mathers, gave a section in his 1934 collection The Torquemada Puzzle Book to challenges of the type: “When spoonerized, what aid to illumination suggests a slim sorceress?” (LIGHTSWITCH via “slight witch”).
The puzzle magazine The Enigma used to run a form of puzzle that it called a spoonergram, where you replace the capitalized words in a piece of (slightly dodgy) verse with two phrases, one of which is a spoonerism of the other:
(4 5; 4 5)
His pretty love was young, petite.
Her FIRST adorned by silken bow;
They shared Sauternes, their joy complete;
Their kisses had a LAST, you know.
That’s TINYWAIST and WINYTASTE. Nowadays, a devoted solver of British cryptics expects to find about one spoonerism a week, tackling clues like:
An insect to flit past, according to Spooner (9)
Spooner’s “you’re such a gorgeous pipistrelle”—no charge? (4, 7)
The answers are BUTTERFLY (via “flutter by,” by Don Manley) and FLATBATTERY (via “bat flattery,” by Paul). And the same kind of thing comes up in American puzzles: The New York Times has offered “Old comic actor’s Little Bighorn headline?,” “Controls a prison guard like a pop singer?,” and “Writer-turned-Utah carpenter?,” for BUSTERKEATON (“Custer beaten”), JAMESTAYLOR (“tames jailer”) and NORMANMAILER (“Mormon nailer”).
Such American spoonerisms cannot be filed merely under oddities or gags: The spoonerism played an important part in the humans-versus-machines battle at the 1999 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. That year, spoonerisms such as “May I sew you to a sheet” (another one attributed to Dr. Spooner) were the reason that a nonhuman entrant, the computer program Proverb, slipped down the rankings—spoonerisms made a lot more sense to flesh-and-blood contestants, a difference we will return to later in the book.
(So if the American puzzle may include the occasional spoonerism or cryptic definition, the British crossword is perhaps best understood as a form where that kind of wordplay takes place, unflagged, in every clue. Tempted? You are in good company . . .)