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.
-
Think you don't know what phonotactics are? Even our youngest English speakers do! You might just not realize it... -
This week, Kathy and Ross challenge Fletcher to an epic eponym quiz, and somehow they detour again into an analysis of pavement. How? You'll have to listen to find out! -
The plural of thief is thieves, so why isn't the plural of chief chieves? And as the old woman once said, where are the beeves??? On today's show, we tackle the tricky nuance of plurals and synonyms that aren't actually synonyms. -
We'll be happy to tell you what this episode is about just as soon as we get back from using the bathroom—I mean, the restroom—I mean, the washroom—I mean, the facilities—I mean… -
Today we address a couple of listener questions, including one about the Third Conditional (???), before moving on to a quiz about Middle English vs. Latin spellings.
-
Today we have a wide-ranging discussion about the words we use, when we use them, and the enormous power they can have.
-
Sometimes words get a whole lot less specific over time, and sometimes people get really mad about that! -
We look at how a tiny little prefix or suffix can completely change the meaning of a word. Or how it could do nothing at all! -
We finish our discussion of the words people would like to see banned from the English language in 2026 and then we uncover some uncommonly odd things about one particular prefix.
-
We go through a list of words people want to banish in 2026 and then take a swing over to the weird world of contractions. You ain't heard nothin' yet!
