Do come in, and mind the step. You've found my parlor, where for some months now I have been setting out, like a plate of cookies, the spoonerisms I have made up and collected over forty years of teaching English to the teenagers of Providence. Please help yourself. There's no charge, and they don't go stale.

I should explain the name over the door. "Tips of the Slung" is what becomes of "slips of the tongue" when you trade the first sounds of the two important words, the sl and the t. That trade is the whole of the art. You'll find a fuller explanation below, and then my collection, sorted by the rooms of a life in which a person is most likely to need one: the kitchen, the garden, the classroom, the church supper, and the doctor's office. My readers, bless them, have sent in their own, and those have a room of their own.

A spoonerism happens when the beginnings of two words change places, so that a perfectly sensible phrase comes out as a perfectly nonsensical one, usually with the speaker's whole face going pink. The trade is made in sounds, not in letters, which my students never believed until they tried it out loud. "Cheese grater," for instance, becomes "grease cheater," not "gheese crater," because what you're trading is the ch sound and the gr sound, however they happen to be spelled.

A good spoonerism is an accident. A great one is an accident that has been polished, the way you'd polish a stone you picked up on the beach at Narragansett. I have been polishing mine since 1953.

The slip is named for William Archibald Spooner, who was born in 1844 and died in 1930, a clergyman who spent his long working life at New College, Oxford, first as a fellow and at last as its warden. By every account I've read he was a kind man and a conscientious one, and he became so famous for tangling his words that the tangle took his name while he was still alive.

Here is the part that a retired English teacher feels bound to tell you. Most of the famous spoonerisms that are credited to him were very probably made up by other people, his own students quite possibly among them, and simply hung on his name because it was the most convenient hook. You'll find them in any book of quotations. I won't repeat them here, partly because you can look them up, and mostly because it seems unkind to keep putting words in a man's mouth that he very likely never said, especially when the whole joke is about words in his mouth. Every spoonerism in this parlor was made up by me or by one of my readers, and we'll answer for our own.

1. Trade sounds, not spellings. Say it out loud. Always say it out loud.
2. Both halves should land on real words, if they possibly can. One real word earns a B. Two earns an A.
3. It should make a picture. The best ones put something in your mind you'd never have thought of otherwise, like a fan of pudge.
4. Nothing I couldn't say at a church supper. A spoonerism can be lovely or it can be lewd, and a great many of the ones that get passed around are the second kind. Not in my parlor. If you send me one of those, I'll know, and I'll think less of you, though only briefly, because I'm very forgiving.

For most of my forty years I began every Friday with a spoonerism on the board, and the class could not open its books until somebody had "unspooned" it. I'm told by former students that this is the one thing they remember from my classes. I've decided to be flattered.

At sixty-nine I spend more time in waiting rooms than I'd like, and I have found that a spoonerism, said quietly, does wonders for a long wait.

A teacher learns more from the wrong answers than the right ones, so here are a few of mine that never got off the ground, for instruction.

• Pash the motatoes. (mash the potatoes) Neither half lands on a word. It's just noise, and not very nice noise.
• Sicken choup. (chicken soup) "Sicken" is a word, but it's the wrong word to put anywhere near soup. A spoonerism should never make you lose your appetite, except for the one about the rolls, above, which I've already apologized for.
• Kot hompress. (hot compress) I worked on this one for most of a winter. It was never going to happen.

Other rooms I visit
Just down the hall here in the Salon, Professor Ashby keeps The Sonnet Workshop, which shows how a sonnet is built, with a walk through Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and four original sonnets. I've sent a good many former students there. And in San Antonio, a woman after my own heart keeps The Society for the Preservation of the Semicolon, founded at her kitchen table in 1997 to protect a modest mark from neglect and misuse. I'm in sympathy with every word; I've always been fond of the semicolon; it's a pause that knows where it's going.