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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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William Spooner
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(1844–1930) Oxford cleric and don (Warden of New College) whose occasional habit of transposing his consonants has given the language the word 'spoonerism' for any such phrase – particularly one that is comic in its results, such as 'beating your Maker' instead of 'meeting your baker'. He has been traditionally credited with some magnificent accidental effects (such as his supposed rebuke to an undergraduate, 'You have deliberately tasted two worms and can leave Oxford by the town drain'), but these are apocryphal.
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