Article Contributed on: 2/10/2008 12:07:54 PM
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a historian and scholar in rhetoric living in 1st century BC Greece under the reign of Caesar Augustus. He rewrote some of the classical texts, altering them on a mainly grammatical level, to make them sound more fluid, natural, and eloquent. He would often reverse or change the order of two or more phonemes in a word.This term can also be applied to changing the order of the words, themselves. G.W. Bush's mispronunciation of Nuclear as Nukular is an example of the reversal of two phonemes.
A phoneme is simply a few letters together that signify a certain sound.
Dionysius called this way of writing "metathesis".
Eisenhower, Clinton, and George W. Bush all mispronounced February as Febuary, which is another common metathesis.
David Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. President (he changed the order of his name upon matriculation to West Point to Dwight David Eisenhower; a process similar to what is meant by metathesis). His early ancestor Hans Nicolas Eisenhauer and his family emigrated from Karlsbrunn (Saarland), Germany to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1741. The name was later changed to Eisenhower.
I gleaned most of this information from Wikipedia on the internet.
Del Knudson