Kathy Petras & Ross Petras
Hosts, You're Saying It WrongKathryn Petras and Ross Petras, a sister and brother team, are the authors of many non-fiction books including the New York Times bestseller You’re Saying It Wrong, That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means, Very Bad Poetry, and Wretched Writing. They also have compiled a series of bestselling quote books such as Age Doesn’t Matter Unless You’re a Cheese and It Always Seems Impossible Until It’s Done, as well as the annual bestselling page-a-day calendar The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said (now in its 24th year — with over 4.8 million copies sold) and its counterpart The 365 Smartest Things Ever Said. Their work has received the attention of, or has been featured in, diverse media outlets including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Bustle, the Atlantic Monthly, the London Times, and McSweeney’s. They have also been guests on hundreds of radio shows and tv shows, including Good Morning America, CNN, Fox & Friends, and NPR’s Here and Now.
Ross collects (and sells) rare books (chiefly early printed books in Latin and Greek). He reads, writes or speaks, with (very varying) degrees of proficiency Latin, Greek, Arabic and French, and loves reading — and watching – vintage sci fi and 1930s romantic comedy. Kathy is a noir film and novel fiend, a bad joke aficionado and committer of dreadful puns, a collector and seller of pulp art prints, and is proud to say she was on Jeopardy (but, sadly, came in third – and only won a designer watch). They both are word nuts, quote fiends and (they must admit) sometimes annoying grammar pedants. Their web site is kandrpetras.com.
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Today we look at phrases that seem at first glance to mean something, but are actually complete nonsense.
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Sometimes what we say or write can be grammatically correct but still make no sense whatsoever. Come along with us down this winding road...
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Now that we're out of summer, it's finally cooled down enough for us to go outside to check the mailbox! We tackle some listener questions and pet peeves, and we take a look at a bizarre new phrase that's entered the language.
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We continue on with our look at the newest words that have been added to dictionaries, and Kathy offers an enormous mea culpa.
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Hot off the presses (or whatever the internet is... cyberpresses?), we look at the newest entries into Dictionary.com!
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This week, we look at some of those nitpicky little grammar traps that sometimes trip us up.
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With the kids headed back to school, Kathy and Ross decided to challenge Fletcher (former two-time district spelling bee runner-up) to a spelling bee!
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It's hot! Still. And why mess with a good thing? We heat up a little more with a quiz about summer-related words!
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Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia... England... a lot of places have tough to pronounce names for Americans, and our listeners aren't letting us forget it. It's time for a global road trip!
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Having been bamboozled by Kathy and Ross in the previous episode, Fletcher resolves to get at one question right this time around. Don't hold your breath, Fletch.