Talking to Vláda and Jana about spoonerism, I’m told that the Czech word for ‘spoon’ is lžíce (sounds something like “le-zit-se”), but people often pronounce it as žlíce (sounds something like “ze-lit-se”).
Now, spoonerism is supposed to have been named after Reverend William Archibald Spooner, a real person who lived 1844–1930 and was the Warden of New College, Oxford, but it is so tempting to think that this Czech spoonerism over the pronunciation of spoon is the real inspiration for the term, don’t you think?
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