Spoonerisms... know what I mean?

I've often wondered what happens in the brain to make us jumble our words.  Jumble like mix the first letter of two words with each other when you're talking.  It happens all the time in conversation.  But why?  I've heard it's called Spoonerism after a gentleman at Oxford in the 1800s who often mixed his letters up.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism. Read that link for the real story (according to the people that write Wikipedia, anyway).

But, again, why?  Do we talk too fast?  This whole spoonerism thing happens to me a lot.  It's funny too, because I don't always know that it happened until I see the faces in front me, blank stares, frantically searching the recesses of their minds to figure out what I meant to say.  Then I'm trying to review what I heard myself say vs. what I thought I said to see if I mixed my words.  That is probably a rather humerous scene to be a fly on the wall for.  Or, sadly, I occasionally call Mike 'Mark' if I'm talking too fast and say a word with an 'r' after his name.  It's like my brain gets ahead of itself or something.  Needless to say, Mike does not love that one.  I'm sorry. It's not intentional.

It is sort of funny though.  As I write this, I'm recalling a converstaion from this past weekend in which this happened. It's funny because it's silly, and once someone notices they've done this it's as if they can't figure out the correct way to say it for a few seconds.  This past weekend, someone mixed the words, realized it, tried again and mixed them the other way, tried again, mixed them back the first wrong way, and then stopped. At the restart, the words came out correctly.  It was rather interesting to watch that go down and to wait, without taking a breath, until the right words came out.  I can sympathize.  Feel free to giggle the next time I do it. 

I'm pretty sure that my best gal, Marie's, sister studied this type of thing for her Ph.D.  Marie- can you confirm this?  So, it must be a big enough phenomenon then.  Does it happen to you?  Thanks William Archibald Spooner for giving us a name to this little linguistic mishap.

"The Lord is a shoving leopard." (a loving shepherd)

Yours in vowel and consonant scrambles,

Whitney