Question: In his book *Mother Tongue* Bill Bryson discusses the Revd. William Spooner, who gave his name to *Spoonerisms*. He comments saying 'What is certain is that Spooner suffered from a kind of ***metaphasis of thought***, if not also of word'. 

The OED has never heard of *metaphasis*, and Google/Wikipedia don't recognise it at all.

Is it possible that Bryson is himself guilty of something like a *Spoonerism* or *Malapropism* himself?

Answer: 
Wiktionary shows its usage from 1953, probably from the term used in biology as an alternative form of ***metaphysis***. 

[Metaphasis](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/metaphasis) (uncountable): 

> 
> ***The accidental transposition of part of the sounds of two words in a phrase; The production of spoonerisms.***
> 
> 
> * 1953, Sir Ernest Barker, Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities ; And, Father of the Man, page 46:
>  'Oxford's great metaphasiarch', as Punch once called him, ***was seldom guilty of metaphasis,*** or the transposition of sounds. What he transposed was ideas.
> * 1979, Gore Vidal, Kalki, ISBN 0345278739, page 31:
>  ***Dr. Ashok suffered from a mild form of metaphasis. He made Spoonerisms.***
> * 1986 October 23, Adrian Room, “Letters”, London Review of Books:
>  But couldn’t it be that there is a distinction to be made between ‘metaphasis’ and ‘metathesis’? The OED defines the latter as ‘the interchange of position between sounds or letters in a word’ (my italics). An example would be Old English bridd becoming modern bird. ***This leaves ‘metaphasis’ free to describe what Spooner did: transpose sounds between different words, like his classic ‘our queer Dean’.***
> * 2009, Denise Sutherland, Word Searches For Dummies, ISBN 0470453664, page 76:
>  ***The technical term for this transposition is metaphasis.***
> 
> 
> 

***[Ngram](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=metaphasis&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmetaphasis%3B%2Cc0): metaphasis***. The term appears in Ngram from the 50s mainly in biological but also literary contexts.
**metaphasis**
n. Transposing sounds or letters in a word or phrase.

It seems that the first recorded instance of this word was nearly 30 years ago.

> 
> The accidental transposition of part of the sounds of two words is
>  technically metaphasis, but for more than 100 years it has been hung
>  around the neck of an otherwise obscure classics don. —“In praise of…
>  Dr Spooner,” The Guardian, December 13, 2010
> 
> 
> 1986 (earliest) SIR: Patrick Hughes is right (LRB, 24 July):
>  ‘metaphasis’ is not in the OED. In fact, as far as I can see, it is
>  not in any dictionary. But couldn’t it be that there is a distinction
>  to be made between ‘metaphasis’ and ‘metathesis’? The OED defines the
>  latter as ‘the interchange of position between sounds or letters in a
>  word’ (my italics). An example would be Old English bridd becoming
>  modern bird. This leaves ‘metaphasis’ free to describe what Spooner
>  did: transpose sounds between different words, like his classic ‘our
>  queer Dean’. —Adrian Room, “Letters,” London Review of Books, October
>  23, 1986 - 
> 
> 
> 

*[both quotes from Word Spy](http://wordspy.com/index.php?word=metaphasis)*