Spoonerisms…

 So, Monday night, I managed to spoonerise for the first time in Japanese. 

For those not familiar with the term, it’s named after a Victorian professor at Oxford university, the Reverend Doctor Spooner, who was famous for it. It’s when you swap the starts and ends of words over and get a new sentence you didn’t mean, like this one of the good doctor’s:

Sir, you shall leave Oxford on the town drain!! (Instead of the down train, presumably said when expelling a student).

Mine wasn’t that funny, I only half spoonerised really, because it was one word. I said しんしゃ、and I meant to say しゃしん… on the other hand, it did turn a relatively normal, boring sentence about taking photos into something more like grand theft auto… 🤣 so maybe it was that funny after all. 

I do find myself wondering after typing this up if spoonerisms are things that tend to happen more when you know a language well and your brain just makes a look up error as it goes to grab vocabulary, because it’s not paying that much attention because it knows that it knows this and has looked up this word thousands of times before or if they can happen more when you are learning and more likely to make mistakes. 

I don’t remember ever spoonerising in French though and I studied that language for ten years…. Although not as intensively as I’m studying Japanese, despite multiple French exchange trips with our twin towns.   Interesting article on Babble about linguistic slips, but it doesn’t address the question of whether they are more likely to happen to experts than newbies at a language… 

It does mention they seem to happen because the brain has two (or more) activation plans for a sentence and splits the difference (which I’ve had happen to me with a single word in English before - I have sometimes said a word that was half of one word and half of another and could remember that I was trying to choose which of them to use https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/spoonerisms-mondegreens-and-more ).

But the twin towns comment reminds me that I really must write up about the virtual exchange I took part in last Friday, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Kansas City being twin towns with Kurashiki - especially since after next weekend, I’ll be wanting to blog about the Greater Kansas City Japan Festival.   

Slight spoiler on that write up, when I was watching the video presentations from each city on what their visitors have learned over the years and how the cities have gained from the relationship, I burst out laughing partway through the Japanese one, wondering if anyone else had noticed how insulting it was… 🤣🤣🤣. I was on mute, but my video was on. Since it was being recorded, hopefully my reaction isn’t in the recording…. 

But the video produced by Kurashiki said that in the student visits, the Japanese students were amazed at how big America is (which makes sense, given the land area, usable land area and the population density).  It went on to say that the American students were amazed at Kurashiki’s culture and history…. 

Which totally implies that America, or at the very least, our area of it, has none of its own and that is why it was amazing… 😳🤣🤣. No one else on the video seems to be reacting, so either it slipped right by them, or they are better at keeping a poker face than I am (which isn’t a high bar to beat, really).