Wixed-up Murds: Spoonerisms on Squidoo

I've got ideas for several new Celtic music lenses on Squidoo, but yesterday when I got up I just knew I had to develop a lens about Spoonerisms. The first thing I did was check and see if anyone else had already done one. Nobody had. I like starting a lens on a subject nobody else has touched yet.

This lens turned out to have more writing involved than most. I did sections on Rev. William Archibald Spooner, the warden at New College, Oxford whose name came to be synonymous with tips of the slung that involve transposing sounds between words. There's one about Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle, a radio comedian in the 1930s and 1940s who developed Spoonerisms into an art and wrote a book of tisted twails drawn from Aysop's Feebles, tairy fales and other stories such as "Paul Revide's Rear" which is worth the price of the book for that title alone! Keen James rescued Stoopnagle's book from obscurity and published his updated version.

The most fun I had was writing my own version of "Rindercella and the Prandsome Hince." It's been done before, of course, and is probably the most popular story that's been Spoonerized. I first heard it on a novelty record in the 1960s. I never owned a copy and had just borrowed one from a friend. Then Archie Campbell did his version on the Grand Ole Opry-based TV show Hee Haw, which I used to watch for the comedy bits. A lot of borrowing goes on in comedy, and you'll probably recognize a bit or two if you've seen Campbell's take on Rindercella, and I did borrow one little bit I remembered from that novelty record. Btw, I couldn't find anything online about the record. I don't remember the name of the guy who did it.

In my research, I found a page for Terry Foy, aka Zilch the Torysteller, who tells Stoonerized spories at several Renaissance Faires in the Midwest. Hmm...and Faerieworlds is in three weeks.