Spoonerism
As spoonerism [ ˌspuːnərɪsmʊs ] refers to an intentional or unintentional interchange of word introductory phonemes or morphemes , resulting in new, often witty meanings of words or phrases arise. In German, spoonerisms are also called shaking rhymes .
Spoonerism is named after William Spooner (1844–1930), Dean and Rector at New College , Oxford . He was a very short-sighted scholar of small stature who cultivated this linguistic tick. However, probably only a few Spoonerisms go back to William A. Spooner himself. Shifting sentences according to this pattern became the hype among Spooner's students at Oxford.
An example in English is: "The Lord is a shoving leopard." (instead of: “The Lord is a loving shepherd.”) The term spoonerism found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary . It is similar to malapropism , in which entire words are exchanged within a phrase or a saying.
Spoonerism is also known as Marrowsky , supposedly named after a Polish count who is said to have had the same linguistic habit.
Literary scholars have sought an exact definition of Spoonerism, but they are divided. Some value the involuntary comedy and reject an elaborately created pun as spoonerism. Others limit spoonerism to replacing the initial syllable (usually one or two letters) of two or more words, but do not allow word rearrangement within the sentence (such as "I'll put a nest in your egg" - instead of "an egg in a nest"). The consensus is that Spoonerism is not just a play on words, but that the newly arranged words have to give a new meaning, in the best case and for the sake of comedy, a completely different one, such as instead of “you cleverly threaded it”: “fucked up”; "Schluckspecht" vs. "Spit badly" or "the dumb thinker" becomes "the stupid badger". A reader criticized an article in the New York Times in 1944 about spoonerisms because the expression “nins and peedles” (instead of “needles and pins”) might sound funny, but there were no “nins” or “peedles” in English. So it is not spoonerism.
In the 1990s, the skits “ Kentucky screams fuck ” from the TV show RTL Saturday Night were popular. The title is a "spoonerized" form of the name of the US restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken . The humor in these skits often consisted of crude spoonerisms. A newer variant of the joke type is the SWR3 comedy Tuten Gag . The British comedian group Monty Python also worked with Spoonerisms in their skits, but often went over to their own word creations (“Ring Kichard the Thrid”, “My dingkome for a shroe!”). The SPD parliamentary group leader Herbert Wehner made a “testicle killer” from the CDU member Jürgen Todenhöfer in the Bundestag .
In 2007, at the 4th international conference Fun with algorithms: FUN 2007 in Castiglioncello, Italy, automatic calculation methods (computer algorithms) were presented with which spoonerisms can be created.
Individual evidence
- ^ Names make news . In: Time , October 29, 1928. Retrieved September 20, 2008. (English).
- ^ Spoonerism Message Lost in Translation . In: Toledo Blade , November 3, 1980. (English).
- ↑ History of spoomerism in: Reader's Digest Magazin , 1995 (English).
- ↑ Translation: "The Lord is a nudging leopard" instead of "The Lord is a loving shepherd." David Weeks, Jamie James: Eccentric. About the pleasure of being different. Hamburg 1998, p. 66, ISBN 978-3-499-60549-9
- ↑ a b Richard Nordquist: spoonerism. grammar.about.com, accessed November 18, 2013 .
- ↑ Marrowsky in Merriam-Webster Dictionary
- ^ Chambers Dictionary. 1993, ISBN 0-550-10255-8 .
- ↑ Jeff Aronson: When I use a word ... Medical Greek. In: British Medical Journal . March 14, 1998 PMC 1112774 (free full text) (English).
- ^ The New York Times. October 3, 1944, letter to the editor from Frank W. Noxon dated September 23, 1944.
- ↑ The monkey does not fall far from the trunk - Malapropisms in literature and everyday life
- ↑ Tuten gag. on the website swr3.de.
- ^ Hans Joachim Böckenhauer, Juraj Hromkovič, Richard Královič, Tobias Mömke, Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich ; and Kathleen Steinhöfel, Department of Computer Science, King's College London : Efficient Algorithms for the Spoonerism Problem. In: Fun with algorithms: 4th international conference. FUN 2007, Castiglioncello, Springer-Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-72913-6 , pp. 78-92, diva-portal.org (PDF; 336 kB).