You're Saying It Wrong

It's our annual airing of grievances, as we vent about the words we'd like to leave in the rear view mirror as we head into a new year. And fair warning: we get pretty petty!

We wrap up 2021 with a look at the most mispronounced words of the year-- we don't even know what some of these things are, let alone how to say them!

Prompted by some listener emails, we're returning to our bread and butter: words we accidentally use when we mean to use other words. It's confusable time!

Medial cluster what now?? Come on, you know you want to hear this. It's something you're doing basically all the time...

We won't turn a blind eye if you get caught red-handed trying to steal our thunder, because today we're digging into the sometimes surprising, usually murky origins of phrases we use every day (and we want all the credit, darn it!).

After our discussion of plurals in the last episode, we got to thinking about all the trouble apostrophes cause us, and Ross proposes a rather extreme solution.

All sorts of fun with plurals today: what we get wrong when we try to use Latin plurals, the rules of English plurals, pluralizing compound words... Look out, our opinions on plurals are like a charging herd of rhinocerotes!

We continue with our look at the most commonly misspelled words in the English language, as we dig into why it is we tend to spell them incorrectly, and the rules about why we spell them the way we do. And since this is English, we know rules are made to be broken!

Kathy and Ross challenge Fletcher to a spelling bee, as they tackle some of the English language's most commonly misspelled words and Fletcher immediately regrets bragging about how good he is at spelling.

Kathy, Ross & Fletcher dip back into their bag of commonly confused words with some particularly pretentious examples.

We continue with our discussion of contronyms by jumping into some seemingly simple words that turn out to have some complicated meanings. And the summer heat has made us a little loopy, which means we devolve into just a bit of toilet humor (PG-rated, of course), so... be warned!

Do you trim the tree before you trim the tree? Do you have to dust after you dust a cake? Today we're looking at contronyms (or antagonyms, or enantiosemy, or Janus words, or...), those cases where a single word can have two completely opposite meanings.

Kathy, Ross & Fletcher explore a few more redundant words and phrases!

This week, Kathy and Ross bring us a list of what they call "flapdoodle words," words that are redundant and just kind of junk things up. Or do they? Some of them might be kind of useful!

No more limits! All You're Saying It Wrong episodes will be available in one fell swoop!

Today, Kathy and Ross teach Fletcher about "flat adverbs," which look just like their adjective counterparts, but are still... adverbs. Think fast! Drive safe! Who needs that pesky -ly ending? Not these words.

Today we take a big step back and answer a common listener question about exactly why we don't talk that much about "The Rules" of English. Spoiler: THERE AREN'T ANY! (Ok, we're kidding, there are some.)