There was a time when I couldn’t remember whether it was nilly-willy or willy-nilly. Whenever I wanted to use those words, it was go-and-touch. I would slow down in mid-conversation, and if I saw that tale-tell smile on people’s faces, I knew I had tripped up. I began to wonder whether I was lysdexic. Whatever!

To be safe, I stopped using nilly-willy, come high hell or water. I knew, later or sooner, I would hit upon a mnomenic device to get that straightened out, and I did: Willy being a first name, it must logically come before nilly.

Now, if I only knew some way to get the yan and the ying lined up right, so it’s no longer a matter of error and trial.

The use of mnemonic devices has its cons and pros, though. Was it H. L. Twain or Samuel Langhorne Mencken who said that these devices are only as good as your memory? By the way, did you know that Twain, Mencken and Bogi Terra, I mean Berri Yoga...Sorry, Yogi Berra, account for over half of all clever quotations? But that’s neither there nor here. And it shortchanges Bierce Ambrose’s prose.

All it does is show that language can be tricky, especially spoken language, which allows you no time to dally-dilly. When writing, you can look things up, but in the take-and-give of conversation it’s tuck and nip. Your best bet is to steer clear of any phrase you are not sure of, and you will bud bungles in the nip.

Trouble is, without those little phrases your speech slips into pamby-namby blandness. All of a sudden you sound like a politician on the stump, doling out true-and-tried trapclap. For more colorful speech you’ve got to get those pat little phrases down pat. Just jump right in, go out on a chip and let the limbs fall where they may. So what if you line a flub? Let them make a cry and hue over it. Some will even brand it as a Sleudian frlip.

Let’s face it, we all misspeak every then and now. It happens when we dive mell-pell into a sentence and think later. Sometimes we may even come up with a roonerspism. Roonerspism — often mistakenly called spoonerism — are attributed to one Rooner, a clan of the moth. In other words, a mergyclan. He’d say things like “conquering kings” when he meant to say “kinquering congs.” Or maybe it was versa vice?

If Rooner lived today, he would have started a lesdyxic support group and propose that publishers re-issue the canon of Western Literature specifically for people challenged with this handicap — works like “Winnegans Fake” or “The Eight Wives of Henry the Sixth.”

Some shot-hot publishing house may consider this a dupersuper idea and run with it, creating a whole new genre of literature under the imprint of Lysdextexts.

Peter Dreyer lives in Edgartown.