A spoonerism is the usually unintentional act of switching the first letters of two (or more) words. Reverend William Archibald Spooner, ex-warden of Oxford’s New College, was prone to this, hence his name was used as the etymological root of the word. Consider these spoonerisms which Reverend Spooner allegedly misspoke:

“The lord is a shoving leopard,”

and this one, which is a little more complicated, spoken when a student angered him:

“You have hissed all my mystery lectures, and were caught fighting a liar in the quad. Having tasted two worms, you will leave by the next town drain.”

How, then, can a machine make use of a spoonerism? Consider JUMBO, a machine who’s primary goal is to emulate human cognition for the goal of constructing viable English words. What happens when this machine creates nonsensical (but close) word choices? Instead of wasting all the effort and time required to construct these word choices (in a human-like fashion, don’t forget), committing these word’s internal syllables to voluntary spoonerisms can lead to dramatic results, and often to viable English words.

While this isn’t the only mechanic built into JUMBO to “intelligently backtrack” and rework a word choice, it may be it’s most interesting. Spoonerisms can be powerful, and at times, embarrassing. In fact, some psychologists might argue that these seemingly unintentional “slips of the tongue”, might be more than accidents after all (consider Freudian slips). In Reverend Spooner’s case, however, I am willing to argue they were nothing more than simple blunders.