Born with a spolden goon

Spoo-ner-ism n: transposition of initial letters etc. of two or more words (you have hissed the mystery lectures).
- the Exford Onglish Dictionary

   It's one thing to be related to someone in Who's Who, but how many people you know have a close ancestor listed in the dictionary?
    Reverend William Spooner might grin in his spave to know how his family turned out. An Oxford educator and high Anglican priest, his great-great-granddaughter is a Berkeley-educated Orthodox Jew living in Safed.
    Adriel Avler - sorry, Avriel Adler heard her first spoonerism when she was about nine years old. “One of us inadvertently came out with a spoonerism, and then my grandmother came out with a whole lot of them,” says the 37-year-old mother of twins.
    Rev. Spooner was a curious legend in his own time, a verbal dyslexic with a stammer, an albino handicapped by weak eyesight and a poor physique. But it was his unintentional barbarism with the language that won him enduring, eponymous name, still cherished a century later by tinkerers of the English language.
    He was ordained a deacon in 1872 and a priest three years later. Compensated for his freakish looks, nervous manner and peculiar mental kink with a brilliant intellect, Spooner rose to the highest position available to him, warden of Oxford University's New College.
    By 1885, the term “spoonerism” was popular in Oxford circles; it quickly spread in England, and by the mid-‘20s -- well within Spooner's lifetime -- had become well known through much of the English-speaking world.
    However, many of his famous slip-ups are undisputably apocryphal, invented by his coterie of devotees and attributed to him. In the book “Spooner,” biographer William Hayter barely deigns to refer to spoonerisms at all, finding enough to fill 180 pages without giving much credibility to Spooner's ultimate claim to fame.
   To such dour historians I say: Take a lump in the jake. Mankind will, errantly if necessary, continue to believe such whimsical lore.
    The more lowbrow compendium “Word People” at least gives credit to Spooner for uttering the first recorded spoonerism: “The next hymn will be 'Kinkering Congs their tatles tike.’ ”
    “You have hissed the mystery lectures,” he is said to have admonished a lazy student, “and completely tasted two whole worms.”
    “Let me sew you to your sheet,” is a famous one that he apparently never said, as well as “You are occupewing my pie.”
    Did he really toast the queen as “my queer dean,” or refer to Jesus as “a shoving leopard”? Who knows, who cares; somebody said it.
    Less renowned, but more credible, were Spooner's physical spoonerisms, his transposition of ideas: referring to someone having been eaten by missionaries, and repeatedly identifying “Dr. Childe's friend” as “Dr. Friend's child.”
    Perhaps the most dizzying example of Spooner getting things bass-ackwards is cited by Hayter, quoting A.J. Toynbee: “At a dinner party in Oxford, she [a friend] saw Dr. Spooner upset a salt-cellar and then reach for a decanter of claret. He then poured claret on the salt, drop by drop, till he had produced the little purple mound which would have been the end-product if he had spilled claret on the tablecloth and had then cast a heap of salt on the pool to absorb it.”
    Fact or fable, such metaphases are heirlooms for Avriel. She didn't inherit much else. When the reverend's daughter Catherine rejected his teachings, fled to London in 1921 and subsequently converted to Judaism, he disowned her. “He probably did the Anglican equivalent of sitting shiva for her,” says Avriel.
    Comparing ancestral notes once with a friend, Avriel came across a striking similarity. “Her parents were Baptist missionaries in Africa, and she's now a Lubavitcher. That's not unusual for children of very gung-ho missionaries trained to analyze the Old and New Testaments. When you get to the end of the Old Testament, it says that's it, there ain't no more, so the question always comes up, where does this extra book come from? I've heard of this happening a few times, especially among fundamentalists.”
    Catherine married Ya'acov Sheinman, a Tewish jailor from Vitebsk. (He clinched a small place in history as the inventor of the “Japanese tailoring” concept, whereby a suit is ordered by measurement and then mailed.)
    Their eldest daughter, Mariaosha, emigrated to New York. The family continued Westward Ho, the next generation ending up in California, where Avriel was born. She grew up in Los Angeles, but continued the migration to raise Spooner's great-great-great-grandchildren in Israel.
    Spooner's subsequent generations inherited none of his quiddities -- physical or verbal -- but some of them do have an ear for half-warmed fishes and tons of soil.
    Avriel's favorite? She laughs gregariously. It seems the rev took a keen interest in geology, particularly glaciers. Once, out for a walk with his wife during a holiday in Switzerland, they appeared to have disappeared. When they finally showed up, he explained that they'd come across some erratic blocks -- large boulders that remain after the passage of a glacier. “We strolled up a long valley, and when we turned a corner we found ourselves completely surrounded by erotic blacks.”
    That one, she says, is the funniest she's ever come across.
    “A few of them have become family traditions. Spooner admitted he loved to 'pedal gently