Spoonerism

A spoonerism is an occurrence of speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see metathesis) between two words of a phrase. These are named after the Oxford don and priest William Archibald Spooner, who reportedly commonly spoke in this way. Examples include saying "blushing crow" instead of "crushing blow", or "runny babbit" instead of "bunny rabbit". While spoonerisms are commonly heard as slips of the tongue, they can also be used intentionally as a word play. Since the rise of the Internet and wordfilters, spoonerisms have also become deliberately used as filter-avoidance spellings of filtered terms. The first known spoonerisms were published by the 16th-century author François Rabelais and termed contrepèteries. In his novel Pantagruel, he wrote "femme folle à la messe et femme molle à la fesse" ("insane woman at Mass, woman with flabby buttocks").