Re: A preliminary look at Spoonerisms


"Neil W Rickert" <rickert+nn@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Cj8mi.26127$2v1.458@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Instead, his view was that, for example, some
circumstance strengthens some core responses (let's look at tacts for the
moment) and then the core responses become temporally organized as a
function of contingencies that produce other units that we call grammar
and
syntax (these are autoclitics). The utterance is often emitted as a
complete
occurrence, not assembled after "the early parts" are emitted. Skinner
felt
that Spoonerisms provided evidence that this, in fact, was the case since
later parts of the response appeared to exert control over earlier parts.

That seems like an over-analysis.

I'm not sure about Spooner. But for most people, spoonerisms are
used (and coined) because they are fun. When my father used to
mention "Thud and Blunder" movies, it was because he thought that
was a better description than "Blood and Thunder".


I was specifically talking about "non-deliberate" Spoonerisms. You seem to
be talking about those that are produced via rule-following, and these are
not of much interest. Still, the fact that there may be "thuds" and the
characters frequently seem to make the worst of blunders suggest some of the
processes operating that I described, though I never heard of the term
"Blood and Thunder." If you are talking about Spoonerisms that "occur to
people" (i.e., not the product of a deliberate rule-generated transposition)
and are funny, your explanation is not far off from mine - except for the
lack of the "explanation" part.


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