Clamn dever
Clamn
dever
In Brief
Figure of speech. Lenehan's reiteration of "Clever,
very" as "Clamn dever" is not itself damn clever. Nor is
Bloom's imagination of how typesetters learn to see words:
"mangiD. kcirtaP." But both apply a trope discussed in
rhetorical theory: metathesis, the transposition of
letters within a word. Metathesis makes up one variety of the
more general rhetorical category of metaplasm, which can also take
the form of adding, subtracting, or substituting letters.
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The term metathesis (muh-TA-thuh-sis) employs a Greek word for transposition (meta- = changed, altered + tithenai = to place). It normally refers to changing the position of one or more letters within a word, but Lenehan's switching of the initial consonants of two successive words seems better described by this concept than by any other. Gideon Burton (rhetoric.byu.edu) cites the wholesale rearrangement of letters in two words as an comic example of the device: "Elvis Lives in Evil Levis." (It could be objected that this sentence is really an anagram, one letter off like Lenehan's "feetstoops." The anagram's rearrangement of the letters in a word or phrase to make a new word or phrase can perhaps be described as a highly developed, hyper-signifying form of metathesis.)
While it is possible to imagine effective rhetorical
transpositions of this sort, metathesis seems more properly a
subject of study in linguistics. Such changes happen
constantly in language use, as when English nouns like
"theatre" become American ones like "theater," or Shakespeare
remakes the noun "cannibal" into the name "Caliban," or
ignorant people confuse "cavalry" and "Calvary." Usages like
the last one appear stupid in the near term, but over time
they often come to be seen as part of the constant ongoing
mutation of human languages.
Richard Nordquist (thoughtco.com) quotes from a March 2014
article in the Guardian by David Shariatmadari titled
"Eight Pronunciation Errors That Made the English Language
What It Is Today": "Wasp used to be 'waps'; bird used to be
'brid' and horse used to be 'hros.' Remember this the next
time you hear someone complaining about 'aks' for ask or
'nucular' for nuclear, or even 'perscription.' It's called
metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural
process."
Lenehan's "Clamn dever" is the kind of neologism that children come up with all the time as they play with the sounds of language on their lips. Bloom's "mangiD. kcirtaP." does not roll as easily off the lips, and it certainly would not be effective used in a speech, but it too shines light on the shapeshifting qualities of language. Here, the backward rearrangement of letters evokes the alternate mental universe inhabited by typesetters (for whom, of course, the shape of individual letters would also be reversed). It gets Bloom thinking of the experience of people who read Hebrew. What must it be like to live in one of those worlds and go back and forth between it and the left-to-right world? Something, perhaps, like the temporal reversals that Joyce envisions in applying the principle of chiasmus.
