British people … continued to believe in empire. It was what gave Britain a unique role in the world, and in return Britain had drawn strength from its empire to enable it to survive two great wars that had wrecked so many of its competitors. Imperial management in the twentieth[…]

Linguistic horror vacui again, and lacuna: the blank part of a manuscript where the ink runs off the papyrus, and lexically the word missing from one language that must be bridged with circumlocution in translation.

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’.

I cannot remember that I spoke a word, though doubtless I did.