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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With the world's greatest sporting event upon us, we look at the origins of some sports-related words. -
A listener question prompts us to think about words like rehabilitate, revamp, and nonplussed, and whether we can be plussed about habilitating and vamping, or if we're just talking nonsense. -
This week, we're talking ambiguous words and ambiguous phrases– sometimes we think we know what we're saying and sometimes we're really wrong. -
Latin may be dead, but we still use it every day. This week we look at some common Latin phrases and what they actually mean. -
We know what a berry is, we know what a cranberry is, but what the heck is a "cran?" We enter the sometimes murky world of the cranberry morpheme...
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As we head into summer, we'll take a look back to see if we can remember what we've learned over the past year.
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After this year's thrilling spell-off in the National Spelling Bee, we try to tease out the definitions of some of the words that won the contest.
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This week, we're talking about some of the very oldest words in the English language, and how little some of them have changed over thousands of years. -
We're looking at words that were made by smooshing together other words, but it all happened so long ago that we completely forgot about it.
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We're dipping back into common rhetorical devices today, and talking about how they can be used to win people to your side... or at least make them laugh a little bit.
