You're Saying It Wrong

Sometimes there are words that really don't mean what they look like they mean. And to avoid confusion, it's probably best you just don't use them. 

Now that we have 17 episodes behind us, it's time for a little housekeeping. No, we're not debating the pronunciation of the word "housekeeping," but instead are cleaning up a few odds and ends, answering questions raised from recent episodes.

On this episode of You're Saying It Wrong, Kathy and Ross explain the notion of the magic "e". Does that "e" have anything to do to hyperbole, epitome, Hermione, and Aphrodite? And speaking of Aphrodite, why does hermaphrodite — the combination of Hermes and Aphrodite — play by different rules?

It's all here:

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In this episode of You're Saying It Wrong, Kathy, Ross and Fletcher discuss jibe vs. jive. They also look at the origins and connotations of "jive" from the 1920s to today.

And our listener question asks why we pronounce primer as "primmer" when we're talking about the little instructional booklets, when the rules of English would seem to indicate we should pronounce it with a long "i", like we do when we're talking about an undercoat of paint.

So much to discuss...

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In this episode of You're Saying It Wrong, Kathy, Ross and Fletcher discuss prerogative and other examples of metathesis (switching letters or sounds around in a word) like prescription, foliage and cavalry.

In this episode of You're Saying It Wrong, we focus on "confusable words," also sometimes called "paronyms": words that look and/or sound very similar to each other but have different meanings.

This episode is a bit of a departure for us. Instead of a specific word we tend to say wrong, Kathy and Ross present Fletcher with groups of words we say wrong. (That theme is still the same.) 

It's probably obvious that we love rules at You're Saying It Wrong. So it's equally unnerving and thrilling when we get to break them. In this episode we're  dealing with split infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and trying to "Latinize" English — all rules we are allowed to break!

Do you pronounce things the way they're spelled rather than the way they're actually pronounced? This issue of "spelling pronunciation" was raised when Kathy and Ross sent the word clapboard to Fletcher. Which brought up other words like waistcoat, blackguard, and forehead. Has there been a shift toward (or towards, if you fall in that camp) spelling pronunciation?

In this episode, we talk about a lot of different words and how to pluralize them, but the specific question Kathy and Ross asked of our host, Fletcher Powell: "How do you say the plural of octopus?"

Are you saying it wrong?