Blunders abound in language and literature.  One of the most amusing is called a SPOONERISM. This term refers to the accidental interchange of the initial sounds of two or more words.  When you mean to say "well-oiled bicycle" and it comes out "well-boiled icicle," that's a spoonerism.   Most people have made such slips at one time or another, but for some people, like the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) of Oxford, it is a chronic speech infirmity known to medical science as metathesis.  Spooner, however, committed this type of blunder so often and so spectacularly, that it is now always associated with his name.

    One day Spooner told a student, "You hissed my mystery lecture and can leave Oxford by the town drain."  Another time he referred to Queen Victoria as "our queer old dean."  He once told an audience, "We all know what it is to have a half-warmed fish inside us."  He meant to say "a half-formed wish."

    Spooner also had other oddities.  He once said to a student, "Mr. Coupland, you read the lesson very badly." Coupland replied, "But, Sir, I didn't read the lesson."  Said Spooner after a pause, "Ah, I thought you didn't."

    He told a newly arrived member of the college, "Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson."  "But Warden," replied the young man, "I am Casson."  "Never mind," said Spooner, "come all the same."

    But Spooner was best known for his spoonerisms, a term that came into general use and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in his own lifetime.   To give a few other examples: Spooner went into the dean's office one day and inquired of the secretary, "Is the bean dizzy?"  On another occasion he meant to observe that the cat dropped on its paws, but he said, "The cat popped on its drawers."

    Just after the First World War, he told someone, "When the boys come back from France, we'll have the hags flung out" (the flags hung out).