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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We'll look at the surprising origins of some common summer-related words, phrases, and idioms. -
We take a road trip to the U.S. South to look at some place names that have some pretty surprising pronunciations. Bless our hearts (in a good way)! -
We take another shot at figuring out what's good and bad about the technical uses of common words. -
We look at the confusing, but surprisingly intuitive, world of adjective and adverb order and how we can know what we're doing without knowing what we're doing. -
This week, we look at the (sometimes huge) differences between the technical, specialized definitions of words, and what they mean to everybody else.
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School's out, so we're celebrating all the new graduates by looking at the backgrounds of some graduation-related words.
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We return to one of our favorite (and sometimes most confusing) topics: rules of English that we know instinctively, but that we have no idea we know.
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Today we make a lot of noise by exploring nonverbal vocalizations: all those sounds that aren't words, exactly, but that still carry a lot of meaning.
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To split infinitives or to not split them? (Ir)regardless, we'll dive into some everyday language arguments that get people all worked up. -
Oh, so you think those two words mean exactly the same thing? Not. Even. Close.
