SPOONERISM: YOU HAVE HISSED ALL MY MYSTERY LECTURES
What’s so funny about this? I’m going to try a new format with spoonerisms. I’ll show you a photograph with one half of the spoonerism and you will have to guess the other half. As long as you know how spoonerisms are constructed, you should have no problem. But in case you have forgotten, spoonerisms generally consist of two word phrases where the initial letters of the two words are interchanged. Occasionally, as in this spoonerism, the phrase may contain more than two words but they are minor and not the focus of the phrase. Usually the two spoonerized words are either nouns or verbs; pronouns and prepositions would be considered minor. In the photo you see a college or university, or perhaps a private school lecture hall. As a side note, what we call “private schools” in the US, are call “public schools” in the UK. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, it’s clear that the students, who are mostly boys, are attending and listening to a lecture. It is an old photo, taken, no doubt, when private schools were usually for one sex or the other. If you haven’t figured out the spoonerism yet, take note of what is unusual in the sentence. It is not common for students to hiss at an instructor, professor or lecturer. It’s considered extremely rude or impolite. When done, it signifies a high degree of disapproval. It’s the lecturer who’s talking and saying that the boys all hate his lectures about mysteries. It could be lectures about crime novels, which are known as mysteries; or they could be religious mysteries, but the students seem too young for that; or maybe no one knows the topic ahead of time. Whatever, the statement seems a little out of whack, or strange. That’s because if you flip the first two letters of “hissed” and “mystery”, the spoonerism becomes: You have missed all my history lectures. So he’s scolding them for not attending his classes. This guy must really be boring. And THAT’s what’s so funny!
This spoonerism came from Procrastination@twitter.com
