SPOONERIANA.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIII, Issue 306, 23 December 1912, Page 5 (Supplement)

SPOONERIANA.

(By A. T. CORKE.)

The perpetration of the literary atrocity known us a "Spoonerism"' must needs be an act of spontaneity, and not of malice aforethought: and he who deliberately applies himself to the achievement of an example is as one who beateth the air. Few indeed of these involuntary inversions of words that add to the gaiety of nations, and are so familiar to all English-speaking races, may fairly be attributed to their reputed author, the reverend Canon and Warden of New College, Oxford; and in the following medley of examples an impersonal progenitor is assumed —the vicar, formerly a college don. It is possible that the earliest recorded examples occurred during the Long Vacation of 1871, when the vicar spent six weeks in Switzerland, "ramgling up the Uralps": and, a little later, a fortnight at Portsmouth, viewing while there the "cattleships and bruisers.'' On reaching Waterloo, after inquiring why his train had not "clapped at .Sfopham Junction.'' he left his "rags and a bug" with a porter while he went to the re-freshment-room for "a bath of milk and a glass bun." During the course of an address on '-Kindness to Animals" to the local branch of the Girls' Friendly Society, he remarked that in Piedmont, where the sheep were so cherished, a flock would willingly follow a shoving levpard." The meeting in question was very sparsely attended, most of the forms in the schoolroom being unoccupied; the vicar attributed this to the fact that it had been "roaring with pain" ever since noon, and added that, as it was "beery work speaking to empty icenches," they would close by singing the well-known hymn, "From Iceland's greasy mountains." The tale of his ecclesiastical mishaps is a long one, ranging from his announcement that "We will now sing Hymn 175, 'Kinquering konks their fallen tike,' " to the historic occasion on which he delivered a profound discourse on the text, -It is easier for a camel to pass through the knee of an idol." etc. One chilly Sunday morning he electrified his hearers by informing them, in the course of his sermon, that he felt a "half-tea.-mcd fish" rising in his bosom. To a lady whom he found in possession of his stall in the college chapel he gently observed: "Excuse mc, madame, you are occupeicing my pie; but if you will wait a moment the verger will sew you into a sheet."' Among the vicar's other '"derangements of epitaphs" may be cited the following: His regret that he would be obliged to give up nis local tradespeople, and in future "steal at the doors": his depreciation of the prevalent habit of reducing everything to a 'Head devil"; his predilection for "horse-raooi'f with his Welsh radish"; his inquiry as to the suitable "tax for a tips -cab"; his remarkable apostrophizing of on amazed audience of agricultural

labourers as "You tons of soil"; his inimitable rendering of a certain line in "The Bin i i! of Sir John Moore. - ' "As his hone on ihe ramparts we curried": his request at an <>i Boys' Dinner (at the Dull Man of (.Tec with), when the sweets appeared, for "so of that stink pvff," and at dessert for "s, pigs' fi-eas," and in his subsequent speech. avowal that he felt much -gnittcred and tified" by his reception: his complaint to station-master of the continued unpunclu of the "town drain" : and his story of tin i derful escape of his favourite cat, who. falling from a roof, "light popped on v cbrawera." But the apotheosis of his vagaries is read-. 1 in this stern reprimand to an erring and. 1. t us hope, repentant undergraduate: "Sir. your conduct has been nothing less than disgraceful; you have hissed three of my mystery lectures, you have been convicted of fighting a liar in the inner quad. and. in addition. there is no doubt whatever in my own mind that you have tasted a whole icorm .'"