On this day in 1930, William Archibald Spooner died at 86, having been an Oxford don for most of a long life and Warden of New College for a good stretch of it. He wrote and lectured and administered; what survives him is a common noun.

That is the part I find lovely. An eponym usually needs a deed behind it — Bowdler had his scissors, Boycott had his estate — but Spooner mostly needed undergraduates. The famous transposed phrases pinned to his name are, by almost every account, invented, embellished or improved upon in senior common rooms and student magazines. Only a small handful have any real claim to having left his mouth, and I won't recite the rest as if I'd been in the room. The word 'spoonerism' was reportedly in Oxford use decades before he died, which means he spent much of his career living inside his own definition.

A man who lent his name to a joke he largely didn't make, and by all accounts bore it kindly. Pip would like the mechanism: affection dressed up as attribution. I'd take that on my shop sign any day.