Word: spoonerism
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When many of Spooner's classmates look back at their Harvard years, they come up with phrases that sound like flashy book titles...
...John Spooner '59, a writer and investment banker, recalls a deal he made with his six freshman roommates a quarter of a century ago. "Everyone in that room wanted to write a novel," he says. "We had one title that would belong to the first published writer among us: 12 Minutes to Park Street." The title now belongs to Spooner, who says he is still toying with possible storylines...
...amusement park. Gary Sinick's photographs of stallions frozen in mid-prance, oversize rabbits, frogs and chickens reveal the wealth of detail and coloration that distinguished the finest carousel craftsmen of the U.S. and Europe. The form gave wide latitude to the imagination. English Carver C.J. Spooner, for example, commemorated British heroes of the Boer War with a series of centaurs. Among them: a figure that is half horse and half General Robert S.S. Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts...
...appears every fifth or sixth page). Still, by 1961 diplomas carried situations in the vernacular and not the Latin. A sense of excellence, of self-satisfaction, and of confidence, dominate the reminiscences from this year in Lant's book: "Freshman year I was thrown among brilliant strangers," John D. Spooner '59 writes. "General Motors Scholars, National Merit Scholars from Nebraska, Mississippi Pennsylvania, California, New Jersy and Texas...all public school boys. They were all brilliant, but they felt instinctively that they were special and had special things waiting for them in life...
...such things as the introduction by Radio Announcer Harry Von Zell of President "Hoobert Heever," as well as the interesting message: "This portion of Woman on the Run is brought to you by Phillips' Milk of Magnesia." Bloopers are the lowlife of verbal error, but spoonerisms are a different fettle of kitsch. In the early 1900s the Rev. William Archibald Spooner caused a stir at New College, Oxford, with his famous spoonerisms, most of which were either deliberate or apocryphal. But a real one-his giving out a hymn in chapel as "Kinquering Kongs Their Titles Take"-is said...