Reversonyms?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
wrote:
>
> On Sep 19, 2008, at 10:37 AM, Mark Peters wrote:
>
> > That's my first stab at a name for a type of nickname that is
> > seriously neato, though I only have two examples at the moment.
> >
> > The first is for myself: My friend Leslie used to call me "Park
> > Meters".
> >
> > Then my friend Brandi just told me about a woman named Mary Helen
> > she called "Hairy Melon".
>
> how about "Spoonernyms"?

Yeah, I was going to suggest "spoonerized names" -- that's more succinct.

There was a rock band of the late '90s called Buckcherry, which is of course a
spoonerization of Chuck Berry.


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org