The Rev. W.A. Spooner was reputed to have had a dreadful habit of confusing his message in the process of giving it:

At a wedding he told the groom, "It is kistomary to cuss the bride."

Calling on the dean of ChristChurch he asked the secretary, "Is the bean dizzy?"

Giving the eulogy at a clergyman's funeral, he praised his departed colleague as a "shoving leopard to his flock."

In a sermon he warned his congregation, "There is no peace in a home where a dinner swells," meaning , of course, "where a sinner dwells."

Speaking to a group of farmers, Spooner intended to greet them as "sons of toil," but what came out was, "I see before me tons of soil."

Many "spoonerisms" are known to be apocryphal. Better authenticated are some of Spooner's other comments, for example, he once said to an undergraduate he met in the quad — 'Now let me see. Was it you or your brother who was killed in the war?'

A group of reporters once asked him what he thought of Babe Ruth. Caruso, who was unfailingly polite and amiable, replied that he didn't know because unfortunately he had never heard her sing

King Gustav V of Sweden presented Jim Thorpe with a bronze bust during the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and told him, "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world."
"Thanks, king," said Thorpe simply

Zsa Zsa Gabor once appeared on a television program in which guest celebrities attempted to solve viewers' conjugal problems. The first question came from a young lady: "I'm breaking my engagement to a very wealthy man who has already given me a sable coat, diamonds, a stove, and a Rolls-Royce. What should I do?"

"Give back the stove," advised Zsa Zsa.

The story is told that Dürer and another struggling young artist named Franz Knigstein worked together as miners to earn money for their art studies. But this hard labor left them little time to study art. They decided to draw lots: One of them would continue to study full-time while the other worked to support him until he became a successful artist who would then be able to support the other in his studies.

Dürer won. After he became a famous artist, he returned to keep his part of the agreement. By then, however, the years of hard labor had caused his friend's hands to become twisted and gnarled, and he could no longer use them for the delicate brush strokes of an artist. Franz told Dürer that he was happy that his labor had helped to produce such a great artist.

Dürer looked at the hands that had supported him all those years, and sketched them. The sketch —the "Praying Hands."