Toin Cosses and other Spoonerisms

Since I was a teenager, I've caught myself transposing the sounds of certain word pairs. People who are dyslexic do this all the time, but I've been reading since I was three, so it's more likely that my linguistic glitches are due to climbing out of my crib and landing on my head when I was 1. No, I take that back. My mom does the same thing, so it's a good bet that this is a genetic trait carried on the X chromosome.

The phrase that gives me the hardest time is Coin Toss. For some reason, those words have been twisted in my brain ever since I learned them. If I don't think ahead of time, I always say Toin Coss instead. Weirder still are my continual mixup of the words umbrella and elevator. I've noticed since childhood that I often say, "I'll go get the umbrella" when I meant that I was going to press the call button for the lift. Apparently these words got filed near each other in my brain: Both go up and down, both are long and thin (sort of), and both are found by opening the front door of my mom's apartment.

My mother has linguistic goofs that she is unable to fix, owing surely to a relative drop in neural plasticity over time; layfolk would comment on the connection between old dogs and new tricks. Some of her idiosyncracies include "counseltation" for consultation and "foo TAHn" for futon. I've mentioned these to her before but to no effect. She's quick as a whip, but language mixups can be really hard to undo.

If you don't think that's so, try talking normally without using a word that has an E. It's not too hard, but it can trip up many folks and is mighty difficulty to do out loud.

But it's not impossible: Note that in the above paragraph, I didn't use the letter in any of the words.