A lack of pies for a pack of lies – what spoonerisms reveal about how the brain produces speech

“You have hissed the mystery lecture. In fact, you’ve tasted the whole worm!” If you’ve never heard that sentence before, you’re probably wondering what on earth it means. It was supposedly delivered by the absent-minded Rev. William Archibald Spooner after a student missed his history lecture and wasted the whole term. These accidental mix-ups of sounds, known as spoonerisms, are among the most well-known speech errors. They can be delightfully funny, but for linguists and psychologists they’re much more than a source of amusement. They offer a rare glimpse into one of the most astonishing things our brains do every day: turn thoughts into fluent speech in a fraction of a second. As a linguist, I’m fascinated by the hidden machinery of language. In my new book, “Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language,” I explore what speech errors reveal about the mind. It turns out that our mistakes are often just as revealing as our successes. The man behind the spoonerism William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) was an Anglican priest and scholar who later became head of New College at the University of Oxford in the U.K. By all accounts he was brilliant, kind and notoriously scatterbrained. Somewhere…

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