Linguistics
A stumbling Oxford don gave his own name to swapped sounds
The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, a lecturer at Oxford, was said to be prone to accidentally swapping the initial sounds of words, turning 'a well-oiled bicycle' into 'a well-boiled icicle'. Whether Spooner actually made most of the errors attributed to him is disputed, but the slip earned its own name: the spoonerism. Linguists study these swaps for what they reveal about how the brain plans speech before it's spoken.