A Spoonerism, named for the Rev. Spooner of New College Oxford, who is supposed to have often made this kind of speech error (or maybe he was just making jokes), is when the first letters of two word phrases get swapped, with amusing resuts.

For example Spooner allegedly said to a wayward student: "You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. Please leave Oxford on the next town drain."

I've long wondered if there are any triple spooners. These would be three words for which shifting the first letters of each word in a cycle gives a different set of three words.

These seem quite hard to think of, so today I concocted a computer program to generate them. It generates plenty, but so far none have been all that memorable or funny, and many include very unusual words, so they don't really work.

The best I have so far is this. It's not too bad, although there are probably better ones out there.

A regular newspaper columnist referred to plans to grow watercress in allotments.

Another paper commented on the article under the headline

PRESS SLOT CITES CRESS PLOT SITES