Spoonerism [noun] a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect.

You can view the documentation here

We've all done it; someone says a phrase, and you flip the first few letters around, and sometimes, it makes an even funnier phrase. For example: "Tomb Raider" becomes "Romb Taider". Well, when I was in high school, we took it further -- probably too far -- and made a rule set. This gem, which includes a command-line executable, follows those rules, which are:

• Each word drops its leading consonant group and takes the leading consonant group of the next word.
• If the word has no leading consonants, nothing is dropped, but it still receives the next word's leading consonants if it has any.
• If the next word has no leading consonants, the current word receives no consonants, but will still lose its own if it has any.
• When being "lazy", common words ("the", "his", etc.) remain unchanged.
• If the word to pull from is excluded, that word is skipped, and you pull the leading consonants from the next non-excluded word.
• "Q" and "U" should stay together (like "queen").
• A lot of the time, the words won't look how they're supposed to sound, as you go by how the word used to sound, not how it's spelled. For instance, $ spoonerize two new cuties becomes "no cew twuties", but it would be pronounced "new coo tooties", as the words retain their original sounds.

Just install the gem!

gem install spoonerize

If you don't have permission on your system to install ruby or gems, I recommend using rbenv, or you can try the manual methods below.

From your terminal, clone the repository where you want it. From there, you have a couple of installation options.

git clone https://github.com/evanthegrayt/spoonerize.git
cd spoonerize

# Use rake to build and install the gem.
rake install

# OR manually link the executable somewhere. If you use this method, you cannot
# move the repository after you link it!
ln -s $PWD/bin/spoonerize /usr/local/bin/spoonerize

Call the executable and pass a phrase as arguments:

$ spoonerize not too shabby # => tot shoo nabby

If it didn't flip the way you wanted it to, you can reverse it:

$ spoonerize -r not too shabby # => shot noo tabby

If you find a phrase funny enough to save, you can pass the -s flag. This will write the results to the logfile. You can print your log file with the -p flag. It will show the original phrase, the end result, and the options used to get the results. For example:

$ spoonerize -s not too shabby
Saving [tot shoo nabby] to ~/.cache/spoonerize/spoonerize.csv

$ spoonerize -rs not too shabby
Saving [shot noo tabby] to ~/.cache/spoonerize/spoonerize.csv

$ spoonerize -p
not too shabby | tot shoo nabby | No Options
not too shabby | shot noo tabby | Reverse

Here is a list of all available options:

-r, --[no-]reverse               Reverse flipping
-l, --[no-]lazy                  Skip small words
-m, --[no-]map                   Print words mapping
-p, --[no-]print                 Print all entries in the log
-s, --[no-]save                  Save results in log
    --exclude=WORDS              Words to skip

You can create a config file called ~/.spoonerize.yml. In this file, you can change default options at runtime. Available settings are:

# Setting       Default
excluded_words: []
lazy:           false
reverse:        false
logfile_name:   '~/.cache/spoonerize/spoonerize.csv'

Options set by this file can be overridden at runtime by the use of the executable's flags.

The API is fully documented, but below are some quick examples of how you could use this in your ruby code.

require 'spoonerize'

spoonerism = Spoonerize::Spoonerism.new(%w[not too shabby]) do |s|
  s.reverse = true
end

spoonerism.spoonerize
# => shot noo tabby

spoonerism.reverse = false
spoonerism.spoonerize
# => tot shoo nabby

spoonerism.logfile_name = '~/.cache/spoonerize/spoonerize.csv'
spoonerism.save

You can also use the config file, either by passing it at initialization, or via the setter. The config file will be automatically loaded if passed at initialization, before the instance is yielded so you can still change the values via the block. If set via the setter, you must call #load_config_file.

# Config file would be automatically loaded before block is executed.
s = Spoonerise::Spoonerism.new(%w[not too shabby], '~/.spoonerize.yml') do |sp|
  sp.reverse = true
end

# Config file would need to be manually loaded.
s = Spoonerise::Spoonerism.new(%w[not too shabby]) do |sp|
  sp.config_file = '~/.spoonerize.yml'
end

s.load_config_file

I do these projects for fun, and I enjoy knowing that they're helpful to people. Consider starring the repository if you like it! If you love it, follow me on github!