History of the English language
them. Thus, it is not unusual for slips of the tongue to happen in which sounds of the same
word change places e.g. "brake fluid" turns into "blake fruid" ,"past fashion" > "fast
passion" The same principle applies to whole phrasesand even sentences, which shows that
they, too, are largely preassembled in the mind before being uttered. On the sentence level
sometimes the term "spoonerisms" is used < Reverend Spooner (19th century) famous for
metathetic slips of the tongue:"You have tasted two worms" (pro "You have wasted two
terms").The defining feature in the case of metathesis is that all sounds remain in
theword (sentence), they just change places. It is this feature that allows psycholinguists
to infer that words and sentences are preassembled in the mind: all sounds are there but the
order gets mixed up in the process of actual uttering/pronouncing.
NB
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