Tips of the Slung

By Allan Metcalf. To the language gourmet, nothing is as delectable as a mistake. A correct spelling, punctuation mark, word choice, or pronunciation doesn’t tempt the palate; it merely indicates that the author has successfully followed convention. To put it another way: Happy utterances are all alike; each unhappy utterance is unhappy in its own way. You could write a book about the latter. Call it something like “Eats Shoots and Leaves,” and  you might have a best seller. There is one kind of mistake that’s so delicious, even its perpetrator is often amused. That’s the “slip of the tongue,” immediately recognized by the speaker and quickly corrected, often with a smile. The most famous tips of the slung are those attributed to the Rev. W.A. Spooner, late (1844-1930) of Oxford University, who is said to have said something like: “You have hissed the mystery lectures; you have tasted the whole worm.” He also supposedly talked about “fighting a liar,” “a half-warmed fish,” “a blushing crow,” “cattle ships and bruisers.” Such was his rumored proficiency at such transpositions that they have acquired the name “spoonerisms.” One of the perks of being a linguist is that you have a good excuse for studying errors like those: They tell you so much about the nature of language. A pioneer in this field was Victoria A. Fromkin of the University of California at Los Angeles. With help from friends and colleagues, over the course of a few years she collected more than 600 slips of the tongue. She wrote about them in a famous article, “The Non-Anomalous Nature of Anomalous Utterances,” published in 1971 in Language, journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Read more...