You're Saying It Wrong

We'll look at the surprising origins of some common summer-related words, phrases, and idioms.

We'll look at some questionable language decisions the American Founding Fathers made when writing some of the country's most important documents.

Collectable or collectible? Why is it a computer and not a computor? Or is it? We look at the confusing and sometimes (seemingly) chaotic world of suffixes.

When we disagree about what a word means or how to pronounce it, how do we know who's right and who's wrong? And what if we're both right?

After entertaining a few more listener pet peeves, we jump into a discussion on right and left dislocation in syntax, and then touch on the always entertaining world of nominative determinism (wait till you hear about the guy who invented the toilet!).

We tackle a range of topics this week, including a brief quiz on winning spelling bee words, a common pet peeve, and some origins of fancy words.

We wade into the conversation about AI with a look at the effects it's having on our language. Expect some grumbling!

Get ready for some (barely) controlled chaos as we look at phrases that seem to contradict themselves, and others that just get under our skin.

We dip back into the mailbag to answer some listener questions, including one about a famous nonsense phrase.

This week: The thrilling conclusion of one of the most deceptively difficult spelling tests you're ever likely to come across.

Kathy and Ross give Fletcher one of the most deceptively difficult spelling tests you're ever likely to see.

This week, we're looking at words with literary origins. You may not know this, but sometimes writers just make words up.

1985 may not seem like a long time ago, but people back then had some pretty different ideas about how to speak "properly."

What does the stock market have to do with piracy in the West Indies? The Dutch, of course! (Really!)

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 return to our series looking at the most enigmatic, evil words ever found on the SAT.

We're talking about some words of the season as the temperatures have fortunately turned for the better and allergies unfortunately have not.

Today we're taking a trip back into the past — past tense, past participles... When we try to tell someone about something that already happened, it can be trickier than we might think.

We celebrate our 200th episode (!) by taking a trip back in time to look at some words that popped up 200 years ago.

Put on your best evening wear, we're getting fancy! Or maybe we're just getting stuffy. This week we're looking at language that's grammatically correct, but that sounds like you're just trying to impress.

We answer listeners' most burning language questions, including one about how the letter "R" seems to disappear and reappear in the strangest places, and about whether or not anything can ever be called "epic" ever again.

Latin may be a dead language, but it sure seems to come up a lot! This week, we'll look at some common Latin phrases that we think we understand, but that we may not get quite right.

We return to our series looking at the most devilish words ever found on the SAT.

We celebrate the season by looking at some winter-related idioms.

We've tackled the differences between American and British English, but let's not forget Canadians also have a language of their own.