You're Saying It Wrong

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.

The year is 1066: William the Conqueror lands upon the shores of England and changes the course of the English language forever. So what does that mean for us?

We take a look at some modern-day idioms, where they came from, and what they could possibly mean.

We look at a list of words people want to banish in this new year. Some of them we agree with, some of them we won't let go without a fight!

We continue our alphabetical trip through the most challenging words from the SAT.

We'll run through the various dictionaries' selections for the words of the year and offer up a few of our own.

What could be more fun for the holidays than digging into the bizarre world of Latin and Greek plurals? Nothing! That's what!

We wade into the social media wars as we take a look at some of the most common language mistakes people make when they're posting online.

We hit a number of language-related topics this week, kicked off by a listener question about what the heck a participle actually is.