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.
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.
