Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From the gay porn flick Born To Be Bad (seen in a segment of  the compilation The Best of Rod Barry), a pornstar to his sex partner Rod Barry, who’s jacking himself off and is close to coming:

You wanna fuck your shooting load! You wanna shoot your fuckin’ load!

Rather than, um, re-shoot the scene, the director just left the spoonerism in. Well, the guy got it right on the second try.

This is a whole-word reversal (unlike the usual spoonerism examples, which involve exchanges of word parts). For some other (less racy) examples, see section P (Word Reversals) of the Appendix to Vicki Fromkin’s Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence (available on my website, here).

Word reversals preserve the prosody of the intended phrase, as in the porn example above. And, as in this example, the exchanged words are usually the same part of speech: verb for verb above, noun for noun in most cases, like Seymour sliced the knife with a salami for Seymour sliced the salami with a knife (Fromkin’s P2). (Words of unlike category are sometimes exchanged, but usually only when they’re adjacent: Does smoke Jack? for Does Jack smoke? (Fromkin’s P29). Errors like teeth my brush for brush my teeth are rare, though this one did occur in the dementia-disordered speech of my partner Jacques (see here).)

And, as in section S of the Fromkin corpus, grammatical affxes are preserved in their original locations while the words they are attached to are exchanged:

fuck your shooting for shoot your fucking above,

and from Fromkin:

a hole full of floors for a floor full of holes (S1, noun for noun),

a language needer learns for a language learner needs (S12, verb for verb).

So the pornstar’s reversal, in the heat of the sexual moment, went by the book.

(Note, by the way, that despite the sexual context, the verb fuck in the example is not sexual fuck but expressive fuck. In fact, the sex in porn films, as sometimes in real life, is punctuated by a lot of merely expressive fucks — ornamental expletives, you might say.)

This entry was posted on August 12, 2011 at 10:07 am and is filed under Errors, Taboo language and slurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.