Witticisms, innuendos, quips, bon mots…throughout the ages of lit we have loved getting our jollies from the wordplay. The master of paronomasia, William Shakespeare had one of the slipperiest of speeches. While his puns are out of place in our internet savvy world, those bawdy jokes had all heads blushing back in the ages. Not to fret! As they say, a happy life depends on the liver. So if you want to get more jollies out of your content, get messy with language and slip a few spoonerisms in there every once in a while.
Spooning Your Content
Ever wanted to create content tasty enough to get all of the readers coming back for more? Spoon it out in heaping helpings and stick in a few substantiated spoonerisms. Not sure what this is? If you have ever experienced the proverbial Freudian effect, your tongue has become a spoon, tossing back out a mashed up mix of word fun. George Carlin said it best when spooning words: “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”
The Original Spooner
But it was the Spoonermeister that really hailed enamored the spoonerism coffin. Reverend William Archibald Spooner himself, who died in 1930, had a special way of spinning his lips. To be fair, the old soul had bad vision due in part to being albino. Not to be discouraged from his calling, as a scholar and writer, the reverend studied at Oxford for more than six decades.
Throughout his lifetime, even though his brain was fire and his heart was kind, his thoughts would get muddled when writing. In fact, he could not talk as fast as he thought, which made for hilarity around the priestly dining table. Get the rev revved up and you were in for a real treat as his sound switching kicked into overdrive in stressful situations.
By 1921, the Rev was such a serial spooner that his special linguist skill was reported by The Times. In a note about schoolboys at Aldro School, their holiday tasks included writing their own Spoonerism. The newspaper even took to spinning some spoons in their own content. A headline in 1937 stated a man was a bricklabourer’s layer under the headline “Police Court Spoonerism.”
Sodern Day Moonerisms
As you roll into 2018, you need more spoonerisms in your arsenal than the old standby, “The Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take,” which was the Rev’s go-to spoon. Sure, there’s always a blushing crow, a dizzy bean, and the always nosey little cook that becomes the crushing blow, busy dean, and cozy little nook. But we are living in the Age of the Meme when it takes something more relevant than crows, beans, and cooks.
For a fantastic example of spoonerisms in popular society, look no further than the political sketch comedy act of Capitol Steps. Here spoons get their stars and stripes with political spoons of the week. Take the “I’m So Indicted” classics by Paul Manafort or the “Stormy Weather” track from Make America Grin Again. Sports fans also tend to be big into spoonerisms, as a way of covering often profane insults. Puck Flattsburgh, anyone?
Slicing and Dicing Those Spoons
If you are curious about what happens if you spin around some vowels or the last letters of a pair of words, you get a complete dining set of cutlery. A kniferism is where you change the vowels in the middle syllables in two words to scoop up a new phrase. A pop culture example happened when someone called Sir Stafford Cripps was called Sir Stifford Crapps instead.
A forkerism involves eating those words, chewing them up, digesting them, and….nope, can’t even go there. A forkerism twists the final consonants to create new meanings like the Canadian Broadcorping Castration instead of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Scoop Your Content
Even the favored president Abraham Lincoln was quoted with writing, “He said he was riding bass-ackwards on a jass-ack through a patton-crotch.” Oh, good old Abe, forever slipping into literature in the most awesome of places….
Sure, spoonerisms are epic and you want to be the cool bid on the clock by slipping some into your content before this lit secret spills. And best of all, there are few rules! As long as you create a new meaning with a phrase generated by spooning, you are a visionary. The trick is to do this without getting too far from the original meaning. You want to do more than just switch a few first letters or vowels. The key is to keep this literary trick in your writing toolbox, ready to use it whenever the rime is tight.
Want to learn more about how to improve your content and impress your audience while keeping it PC and professional? Check out more content on how to use humor here at WriterAccess from our palented tool of humorous writers.
Miranda B has worked for a leading truck driver job recruiting firm as a web content writer. She has written more than 500,000 words for various truck driving job recruitment sites. Miranda works closely with the client’s publishing team with weekly conference calls in order to produce sticky and knowledge-rich content for their sites.
