Something You Should Know - You Are Mentally Tougher Than You Think & Why We Mispronounce Words

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

If you want to make the food you cook taste better – switch the plates, bowls and glasses. This episode begins by discussing how and why that works. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/30/196708393/from-farm-to-fork-to-plate-how-utensils-season-your-meal# You are probably a lot more mentally tough than you think you are. If you don’t believe me, you must hear my discussion with Amy Morin and she will convince you. Amy is a licensed clinical social worker, and psychotherapist who has a TED talk on mental toughness that is one of the most watched TED talks of all time with over 22 million views. She is host of The Verywell Mind podcast (https://www.verywellmind.com/the-verywell-mind-podcast-with-amy-morin-5115289) and author of the book 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do (https://amzn.to/3LEMfoO) Out of the 16,000 words you say today, you will probably mispronounce a couple. It’s not a big deal really, yet WHY we mispronounce certain words is really interesting. Joining me to explain all this is and why it is important to understand is Ross Petras, host of the podcast, You’re Saying It Wrong (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-saying-it-wrong/id1434115608) and co-author (with his sister Kathryn) of the book You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words--and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse (https://amzn.to/3LKS8B8). Remembering names is a struggle for many of us. If you would like to be better at it, listen as I explain a few techniques that will help you retain the names of people you meet. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201210/the-one-social-skill-can-change-your-life PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Packed with industry-leading tools ready to ignite your growth, Shopify gives you complete control over your business and your brand without having to learn any new skills in design or code. Sign up for a $1/month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk to take your business to the next level today! With Instant Match from Indeed, as SOON as you sponsor a job post, you get a shortlist of quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed match your job description, and you can invite them to apply right away. You only pay for quality applications that match your must-have job requirements! Visit https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING to start hiring now! Zocdoc is the only FREE app that lets you find AND book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them and treat almost every condition under the sun! Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. The Dell Technologies’ Semi Annual Sale is on, with limited-quantity deals on top tech! Save today by calling 877-ASK-DELL Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, one way to make food taste better that has nothing to do with the food. Then, what it takes to be mentally tough and why a little self-doubt makes you even tougher. It's okay to have some self-doubt. You don't have to believe everything that you think. We know that, say, students who have a little self-doubt tend to study harder. Or an athlete with a little self-doubt keeps their head in the game longer and they actually tend to perform better.

Also, how to be better at remembering people's names. And it's really easy. And why we sometimes mispronounce words. Like the word orangutan. Most people say orangutan. They add the G at the end. There's no G at the end. But English likes what are called reduplicates. Dig dong, flip flop. Same thing with yin yang.

It's not, a lot of people say yin yang. But it's not, it's yin yang. All not a lot of people say yin yang but it's not it's yin yang all this today on something you should know this is an ad for better help welcome to the world please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly in it you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat.

Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. We start today with something that any cook will find interesting, particularly if you're a mediocre cook.

It turns out that the weight of your dishes can affect the taste of the food. A study found that food served on heavier plates or in heavier bowls and beverages sipped from heavier glasses taste better. People naturally associate heavier plates with better-made luxury items.

The same proved true for flatware. Volunteers scored the food they ate from heavier spoons and forks as much tastier than the exact same food eaten with plastic or lightweight utensils. And that is something you should know. Would you say you're mentally strong? In your head, are you able to handle the slings and arrows that life hurls your way? And are you able to take advantage of opportunities and situations because you feel you have it all together, you're mentally tough?

Could you maybe use a little more of that mental toughness? Well, here to give you some is Amy Morin. She is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, and she has a TED Talk on the topic of mental toughness, and it is one of the most watched TED Talks of all time, over 22 million views. She's the author of a book called 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. Hi, Amy. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much for having me.

So what does it mean to have mental strength? And what does it mean to not have mental strength? What do those two things look like? Oh, I'm glad you asked. So mental strength, there's three parts to it. The way you think, the way you feel, and the way you behave. So the thinking part is really about do you believe everything that you think? Do you trust the self-doubt that runs through your head? Do you question everything?

Do you ruminate on things? Those kinds of things will keep you from being mentally strong. The emotional part is really about knowing how to manage your emotions. That's not to say that you have to be happy all the time, but when you get in a bad mood, are you able to turn things around? Or if you're anxious and it's not serving you well, can you manage your anxiety in a healthy way? And then the behavioral component is about taking some kind of action. So it might be, you know, I'm tired today, but I'm going to push myself to go to the gym anyway. Or maybe it feels really scary to get up and give a speech in front of a room full of people. But the most helpful action is to get up and do it anyway.

So you're able to push yourself even when you don't feel like doing something, if it's going to lead to the best possible outcome. And when we lack mental strength, we struggle with lots of things in life, everything from our relationships to our ability to get things done, to work. And we get stuck in a dark place and we have trouble digging ourselves out. And then when adversity strikes, it often reduces us to pretty much nothing. And it's hard to get over challenges and it's hard to work through pain. And we just tend to stay stuck in life. The strength, this mental strength that some people seemingly have and other people don't have, is it because, why is it?

Why do some of us have it and some of us don't? Part of it is what we're born with. Certainly our personality plays a role, genetics. Our life experiences also plays a role, genetics. Our life experiences also play a role. If you had an easy childhood compared to lots of challenges that you overcame. And the rest of it, though, is the choices that we make, sort of like physical strength. You can go to the gym, you can lift weights and you can choose to become strong. Mental strength is the same. No matter what kind of hand you were dealt in life, you still have

options of how you're going to spend your time, who you're going to spend it with, and what sort of goals you want to achieve. When you look at people who lack this mental toughness that you described, can you look at their life and say, well, they've been beaten down so many times, that's why they have it? Or some of them have it or is it more it's in your head more than it's in your life that's the thing a lot of times people ask me to identify celebrities who are mentally strong or athletes but you know i don't i don't know i don't know what their internal struggles are i don't know what battles people are overcoming what sort of

struggles they have and as a therapist I happen to know that everybody's battling something. And from the outside, you would probably never know it. And that's why sometimes we see people that have these secret lives. You see an athlete who does really well on the court. They have tons of self-discipline. And then you find out they are also struggling with a gambling addiction. So you don't always know based on the outside of what you see from somebody. But we do know that overcoming challenges successfully is one of those things that helps us become stronger. So sometimes people who go through a rough childhood might emerge saying, you know, I'm stronger and better because of the things I overcame, because it taught me that I'm able to

do things I might not have otherwise thought I could do. Is that a variation on the idea of whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger? Because I've never thought much of that. I actually don't like that saying, because I think it makes us think, well, if I went through something tough and I come out scarred, then somehow there's something wrong with me. And we know a lot of people go through difficult times and they're traumatized. And that doesn't mean that they are flawed in any way. It just means that, yeah, sometimes things do help us and we grow from it.

We know there's something called post-traumatic growth, which people say that tough thing that I went through actually enhanced my life in some strange, unexpected way. But we know that many people go through tough times and they come out from it and they say, you know, gosh, I now struggle. I have nightmares. I am no longer the same person I am, or I feel really jumpy. I'm anxious. Doesn't mean that they were weak. So it's important to note that, yeah, some tension is needed to probably help us become our best selves. But on the other hand, we don't need to like put ourselves in harm's way just to try to toughen ourselves up. Sometimes I think we assume people who have been through tough things are going to be always be able to rise to the occasion and that makes them a better

person. And then they feel that pressure to make it look like they have it all together. We see this with, say, combat veterans when they're struggling so much on the inside, but they don't dare verbalize it because they're afraid that looks like weakness. So let's go back to the things that you say, the elements that you mentioned at the very beginning here, and talk about them one by one. So what was the first one? It has to do with the way that you think and knowing that everything you think isn't necessarily true. And you can talk back to those negative thoughts

that you have to develop a more helpful inner dialogue. And give me an example of that. Let's take self-doubt, for example. So when we look around, let's say you're about to run a race, you look around at everybody else at the starting line and you might think, gosh, these people are more confident than I am. They look like they're going to like they can run really fast. I can't do this. I'm going to embarrass myself. We know that those kinds of thoughts will affect your performance. When you are there and your goal is to just not embarrass yourself, you'll perform much worse than if you say, I'm here to do my very best. And this is true. And with athletes, with somebody who's going to deliver

a speech, somebody who's on a sales call, the thoughts that you have can make a huge difference. But that's not to say we should eliminate all self-doubt. Sometimes people will say, well, if I'm struggling and I'm questioning whether I can do something, then it must mean I don't belong. That's not true either. We know that, say, students who have a little self-doubt tend to study harder or an athlete with a little self-doubt keeps their head in the game longer and they actually tend to perform better. So the key is really knowing that it's okay to have some self-doubt. You don't have to believe everything that you think, but that also you can have a conversation with yourself that's helpful, kind of like the same way you might talk to a friend when you're giving them a pep talk. Self-compassion plays a huge role in our performance,

as does all the ways that our inner dialogue sort of convinces us to behave or the actions that it takes. So you don't have to get rid of all your negative thoughts. You just have to know how do you talk back to those negative thoughts in a helpful way. So you don't have to get rid of all your negative thoughts. You just have to know how do you talk back to those negative thoughts in a helpful way. So you don't have to believe everything you think. I mean, that sounds great, but how do you, if you're thinking it, you obviously must believe it. So how do you think it and not believe it? You can distance yourself from your brain a bit.

So when your brain tells you that you don't belong, that you're not going to do a good job, that you've just humiliated yourself, sometimes just recognizing, is this a true thought or is this just my brain's exaggerating again? When I work with people who struggle with a specific issue, somebody who has an anxiety disorder, they tend to always think about the worst case scenarios. They exaggerate things in their minds. They tend to dwell on the one time that they messed up as opposed to the nine times they did a good job. So just externalizing it a little bit, saying, okay,

the anxiety is making my brain focus on the negative right now. So just because that's running through my head doesn't make it true. And sometimes people will purposely look for the evidence to the contrary. So if your brain tells you, you are the worst person in the room, come up with three ideas that say, no, actually, here's times when I actually did something really well. Or here's three things I've done in my life that's proof that I am smart sometimes or I am good enough sometimes. And when we look for those exceptions to the rule, it can remind ourselves that everything our brain thinks isn't true.

Our brain often goes for the all or nothing kind of thinking. We're either the best at something or the worst at it, or we're horrible at a certain area of our lives and a genius in another area. So just reminding yourself that there's exceptions to the rule can really help balance that out a bit. It also seems, just from thinking of my life experience, that those moments when you start to tell yourself, I don't belong here, these people are going to do this much better than me, I'm going to screw this up. They're typically new experiences, they're not things you've likely done before or been in quite in this

situation. Like if you had two or three times to do it by the third time, you, you would feel more confident, but it's that newness, that strangeness of the situation that makes you start to think I don't belong here. That's just it.

And it's the emotional piece. So we get uncomfortable, we get nervous. And when we start to feel those feelings, it fuels all of those thoughts that tell us, yeah, I can't do this. And it tries to talk you out of doing it. Your brain wants you to be in a comfortable place. Your brain doesn't want you to take a risk. It doesn't want you to embarrass yourself. It doesn't want you to put yourself out there knowing that you might fail. So it'll try to talk you out of it and say, eh, maybe you shouldn't do this. So remembering to do what you just described you should do is probably the hardest thing to do because all those thoughts are screaming at you of what a loser you are. And for you to just tell yourself, no, I'm not a loser in the face of all those screaming thoughts seems like a hard and somewhat ineffective thing to do.

It is. And fortunately, though, we can test it on a daily basis. So it might be you just start doing some physical exercise. Like maybe you say, I'm going to do some pushups. Maybe after three pushups, your brain says, okay, getting tired here. Can't do this any longer. That might tell you you can't do a fourth pushup or it might tell you that you should give up or your arms are going to be so tired tomorrow that you can't keep going.

And the trick is you keep going a little bit longer than your brain tells you that you can. And it's just a really effective way to teach yourself that your brain underestimates you, that it will tell you that you're not capable of doing something. And it's kind of a tangible way to say, you know, my brain told me to give up after three push-ups, but I was able to do six. And it just reminds you that you can keep going even when your brain tells you not to. And if you start incorporating more of those things into your daily life where you test those thoughts, then it serves you well in the bigger cases when you face a bigger challenge where maybe you're thinking,

oh, I don't know about this. Then you remind yourself, OK, my brain underestimates me. I'm going to do it anyway. Our topic is mental strength, mental toughness and how to get more of it. And I'm speaking with Amy Morin. She is a psychotherapist and author of the book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines.

Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful

as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Okay, Amy, so let's move on to the next part after the you don't have to believe everything you think. So then there's the emotional piece. And most of us weren't really taught much about our feelings. How do you deal with feelings? How do you recognize them? And although we do talk about

emotional intelligence, I don't think we're there yet. If I'm giving a speech to a room full of high-level executives and I give them 30 seconds to write down all the feeling words that they know, typically they come up with about five in 30 seconds. Once we get beyond, say, happy, sad, mad, people start to kind of run out of ideas. What else are there for feelings? So we don't know. How do you recognize your feelings? How do you manage them in a healthy way? And mental strength is about knowing it's okay to feel a whole range of emotions, but you don't have to stay stuck in the ones that aren't serving you well. And next?

The other part of that is then figuring out our behavior. So if you feel anxious about something, your anxiety might try to talk you out of it. And so if you can put a name to that, say, okay, this is anxiety. It's trying to talk me out of making this sales call. I'm going to do it anyway. And just putting a name to that emotion helps. So if you name it as anxiety and then figure out, is this helping or hurting? Obviously you want your anxiety to talk you out of doing something dangerous. If your friend tells you to go jump off a bridge, you want your anxiety to kick in. So it's about asking, is this helpful or hurtful? And if you find, you know, it really would serve me well to try to make this sales call or to get up and give this speech in front of all these

people to say, what can I do to talk myself into that so I can take that positive action? And so often our behavior really reinforces whatever it is we're feeling. So when we're sad, we might sit home on the couch and isolate ourselves. Or when we're anxious, we pace and we don't do things that would maybe solve the problem. We tend to avoid it. So it's really about asking yourself, like, what action could I take right now that would be helpful to this? So it might be facing a fear. It might be stepping back sometimes and taking care of yourself. But just knowing I have choices. I don't have to feel like going to the gym, but I can push myself to do it anyway. Which of your 13 things do you find people struggle with the most? I think it's not giving away their power. This is one I could speak to in my own life too.

So often we'll blame other people for stuff like, God, my mom makes me feel bad about myself or my boss makes me work late. And taking back your power is really about saying, you know what, I'm in control of how I think, how I feel and how I behave. Like no matter what, you're in control of your day, how you spend your time and who you spend it with. But it's so easy to lose sight of that. And even in my own life, I'll still find myself saying things like, oh, I have to go to the grocery store. I don't have to

go to the grocery store. It's a choice. And if I don't go, maybe I don't have the ingredients for something I'm going to make for dinner, but that's okay. And when we take back our power, it's just about recognizing those choices. Like I don't have to hang out with people I don't want to. Nobody's stealing my time. Nobody's wasting my time. It's really up to me to make those decisions. And when I feel like people are taking away my power, it's just a sign I should probably set some different boundaries in my life. And then when I do that, I feel more empowered to say, you know, I am in control of my life. Talk about dealing with failure, because I think that really stops a lot of people that they try something, it didn't work out, and that's the end of that. And well, maybe it shouldn't be.

That's just it. For a lot of people, failure is embarrassing or feels like it's the absolute end of the road. Like, well, I tried to launch a business. It didn't work out. So therefore, my conclusion is I'm not a good business owner. And we see in today's world so many successful people, but we usually just see their success. We don't see the 15 times that they failed along the way. And people don't really talk about failure until they've succeeded. So it's easy to say, well, I launched 10 websites before I started this whole giant social media site that's super popular and I'm really successful now. It's much tougher to say, gee, I've failed twice and I'm trying again for the third time and I don't know if it's going to

work out yet. But when we give up after failure, it just really affects who we think we are. When we think, oh, I'm not the kind of person who is able to pass math class. I'm not the kind of person who is able to launch a business or to be successful in certain areas of our lives. But when we face it in a different way, when we just remind ourselves like, okay, failure feels bad, but I can handle feeling bad. And it's not the end of the world. It gives you this new sense of courage where you can say, all right, I'm willing to try again. And if I move forward, I now have more knowledge than I had

the last time that I tried. You know what I'm wondering is, or a question I have is how tough is this to change to get to what you're talking about if you're not there? I mean, what's the success rate? It seems like so much of this is personality and who you are. And to try to change seems like a lot of heavy lifting. Change is definitely tough, but it's worth it. The harder you have to work to make something happen, sometimes the better it feels when you finally get there. So when I always talk to people like we're not going to be perfect, we all make mistakes. This list of the 13 things mentally strong people don't do for honest, we all do them sometimes no matter what. And it's easy

sometimes when life is going well to say, yeah, I don't feel sorry for myself. But then when you're going through a really rough patch, it's much more difficult to not do those things. So I think it's important to be on guard to know that we're always a work in progress. There's always things we can do. But sometimes just little changes every day make a huge difference from saying I'm going to practice gratitude to I'm going to start naming my feelings to I'm going to set healthy boundaries in my life. Little things can make a huge difference in our overall mental strength. Have you ever come across, because people come to you when they're having trouble with this, but have you ever met or are you one of those people who just like do this naturally? They're just mentally strong, tough people.

You know, I encounter a lot of people who act tough on the outside, who feel like if I put up this tough exterior and I pretend like nothing bothers me, then people will think I'm strong. But real strength is about being vulnerable and being able to say, gosh, I struggle with these things. I'm having a hard time talking about feelings and asking for help. And so I think that that misconception causes a lot of people to think I'm so tough, nothing can bother me. But the strongest people I've ever met are the ones who say, gosh, I'm struggling with this. I'm having a hard time. And some of them have even battled things like depression and anxiety, but they're still moving forward, still getting up every day saying, how do I make my life that made it difficult. And my heart was broken. I was struggling so much. And I just wanted to know, okay, how do I give up the things that are going to keep me stuck in a dark place? And keeping that reminder has been helpful. Don't you think, you know, how we think about ourselves,

the way I think about myself, I make the assumption that other people think those things about me as well, which is probably way off. And so we think that the way that the thoughts that go through our head are probably similar to what goes through everybody else's heads. We don't necessarily realize that the things that go through our head aren't what other people are thinking. When you're thinking, my gosh, I'm embarrassing myself, nobody else in the room is thinking that. Or when you're thinking, everybody's staring at me, they're probably not. And just realizing, yeah, okay, my brain lies to me,

so freeing for so many people. I think this whole conversation for many people has been very freeing. Amy Morin has been my guest. She's a licensed clinical social worker and a psychotherapist. Her TED Talk on this topic of mental toughness is one of the most watched TED Talks there is, with over 22 million views. She's also host of the Very Well Mind podcast, and she is author of a book called 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. And there is a link to the book, the podcast, and the TED Talk all in the show notes. Thanks, Amy.

Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome?

Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. This episode is brought to you by Melissa & Doug. Download Bumble and you shop for toys. If the worst thing you do in a day is mispronounce a word or two,

well, that's probably a pretty good day. Still, people notice when you mispronounce words, and what can happen is it can divert their attention away from what you're trying to say to the fact that you've mispronounce words, and what can happen is it can divert their attention away from what you're trying to say to the fact that you've mispronounced words. And what's interesting in English is that we don't always agree on how to pronounce a word, and there are sometimes multiple pronunciations. Well, here to sort this out and explain why this is important is Ross Petras. He is a best-selling author and podcaster,

and his latest book, along with his sister Catherine, is called You're Saying It Wrong, a pronunciation guide to the 150 most commonly mispronounced words and their tangled histories of misuse. Hi, Ross. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Glad to be here. So explain why this is important. Because, you know, if somebody mispronounces a word or mispronounces a name,

and people mispronounce my last name frequently, and I notice it, and I notice when people mispronounce words, but, you know, it's so what? I mean, why? Who cares? Well, first of all, you're absolutely correct. We probably use or speak about 16,000 words a day. And of that enormous number, I can't believe it'd be more than one word a day that we mispronounce. So it doesn't sound that important. I don't think people should be ridiculed for mispronouncing. I think that, and I don't think, I mean, the interesting thing about language is that English doesn't have an academy Francaise that says, this is how you will speak.

English is constantly changing. And there tends to be a consensus around how words are understood and how they're pronounced. And that consensus can depend on where you live as well. So that's a thing in French that they have an an academy that says this is how you'll speak? This is basically, yeah, this is the basics of the language. Grammatically, this is what you do and what you say and what you don't say. English does not have that. And so we know that a lot of words, the pronunciation of a lot of words has changed over time. So when people mispronounce words, perhaps they're just in transition. Maybe those words will soon be

pronounced that way. You bet. I'm looking out the window right now and I see birds on the grass. A thousand five hundred years ago, I would have said I see brids on the garse. The two words, the two letters within bird and grass switched. It's called metathesis, technically. And that's a very common occurrence in language. What would you guess is the most mispronounced word today, if there is one or two or three? Wow. Now, that is a tough question. Actually, let me just do a quick, can I do a quick quiz for you? It's very easy. I'm going to give you a nonsense word. Pronounce B-I-C. Bic. Pronounce B-I-C-E.

Bice. Right. Isn't that interesting? That E at the end changed the vowel right before the consonant into a long vowel. Basically, the E made the vowel say its name, I. And this goes to the word that's commonly misspoken amongst politicians, et cetera. It's hyperbole, H-Y-P-E-R-B-O-L-E, which, you know, obviously excessive speech. A lot of people pronounce it hyperbole. And why do they pronounce it hyperbole? For very good reasons.

For that exact test I just gave you, B-O-L-E should be pronounced bole, not bull. And I guess that would be my favorite word that's mispronounced because it's mispronounced for very good reasons. Well, why is it pronounced that way? Hyperbole comes from the Greek. In ancient Greek, it would be hyperbole. But it came into English, and it hasn't yet had time to acquire an English gloss to it. I mean, we have the same thing.

Whereas, for example, let me give you another quick example. In the 1740s, there was a city founded on the banks of the Mississippi by French trappers. They called it St. Louis. It's now called St. Louis in good American English. I would never call it St. Louis. Probably with hyperbole, it'll become hyperbole in 100 years or so. It seems we have some words that get mispronounced, I guess, because we're lazy. You know, like we say February instead of February, because it takes more effort, or lackadaisical instead of lackadaisical. I don't know. I guess it just comes out easier. But it's wrong, but it gets mispronounced a lot. My sister always used to say asterix rather than asterisk. And a lot of times those words are words that were the SK or the KS or the combination of vowel sounds or consonant sounds. They're kind of tricky to get our tongues around, and we kind of relax a little bit, so we mispronounce it. So here's the thing, though.

When you mispronounce it, I still know what you mean. It doesn't lose anything by the fact that you mispronounced it, so who cares? I agree to an extent, and I disagree to an extent. The key thing is, when you speak, you really want people to get the complete idea of what you're saying and to focus on what you're saying. We get thousands of inputs as we're listening to something. We not only hear words, we feel a little breeze. We hear a little bit of a noise

downstairs. So the best thing to do is to focus speaking clearly. Just before we had this interview, you had me manipulate the microphone to the optimal sound level so that I could be heard as clearly as possible. And I think it's the same thing with language, really. You want to get your point across as clearly as possible, not have people focus on a mispronounced word or whatever. Again, it's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's helpful. And to some degree, particularly with names, I think names do matter to people. People don't like it if you mispronounce their name. What's another example of a mispronounced word that isn't necessarily because we're lazy, but something else happened that made it become so mispronounced okay

here's one that I mispronounced for years it's very embarrassing it's MIS led it's pronounced misled a lot of people and there was an article in the American Journal of higher education where a lot of scholars pronounced it my sold as if it was a verb. It is not a verb. It's just the past tense of to mislead, misled. I would say micelled. That's bad. There was like some scholar, she was giving a speech and she said, I was micelled by this. And people noted that, which is not a good idea. Another interesting one is it's written as victual, V-I-C-T-U-A-L. And I used to watch a show many years ago, the Beverly Hillbillies,

and Granny would always have vittles. It has like a Southern intonation to it. And that's the correct pronunciation. The C-T that came in, came in much later and it's still pronounced Vittle, not Victual. That was one of them. The other one was Comptroller. It's really controller. But when these pedants in the 1500s and 1600s decided to go backwards to the origins of the word, they put the P back in. And controller, like in a business thing, is not pronounced comptroller, although a lot of times it's spelled C-O-M-P. Actually, I'm going to throw one other example. You were asking what a common mispronunciation is. And again, it's by good English rules is orangutan. Most people say orangutang. They add the G at the end. There's

no G at the end. But English likes what are called reduplicates, ding dong, flip flop, and the last consonant is usually the same. Same thing with yin yang. A lot of people say yin yang, but it's not. It's yin yang. But again, English likes when you have two words sound the same, they like the same ending. So people, for very good reasons, pronounce it badly. One of the ones I don't like is realtor.

It's only a two-syllable word, and people often, even realtors, say realtor. And I wonder why. Well, that's a spelling pronunciation. They see – there's a sort of rule in English that if the first – if there are two vowels, usually the first vowel takes precedence, so it's realtor. But when you look at it, they have the A after that and they decide, well, it's going to be real. They're looking at the spelling and then trying to pronounce it as – and then they hear it. Other people mispronounce it and then they hear it.

My guess would be that realtor and realtor are going to be the same word and there's not going to be a distinction. Yeah, well I think that's kind of almost here. But it is interesting how that one just particularly bothers me for, I don't know why, because it seems so clear to me. There's no third syllable in the middle. I agree with you, but it's funny how that happens. I'm going to ask you a question.

How do you pronounce T-H-E-A-T-E-R? Say it again? A movie, you went to a movie. Theater. Theater. Now, that's interesting. That's the generally accepted correct pronunciation i say theater which is generally not seen as correct and here we go again is that a big deal

i don't think so at all but my sister and my wife both hate hearing me say theater i have no idea why so here's one that i hear a lot too, that I don't understand, but I think may, if it hasn't already become the same oriented and orientated. Oh, now we're going into my area. I hate orientated. I just hate it. I generally accept it. And that's one where I'm going to be like you are with theater or theater. I hear orientated and it just it's great. I feel like fingernails, you know, fingernails on a chalkboard, which is not a good thing if you're trying to win me over on a, you know, on a business call or whatever. I hate it. You talk about this surprised me when you see the word as it is pronounced in French, papier-mâché, you say the

correct pronunciation is paper-mâché, but it seems like paper-mâché should be spelled paper-mâché if you want to pronounce it that way. You bet, but then again, laugh should be spelled L-A-F-F if you want to pronounce it that way. English spelling... No, no, no. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That's not... Okay, we're going to get an argument here. Good. Go. Papier-Mâché is the correct spelling and pronunciation in French. L-A-F-F isn't correct anywhere. That's a very good point. You're right. What happens is that, again, we're talking about convention. Convention in English is it's pronounced Pap-mâché, even though it's spelled papier-mâché. English, what you're saying is correct with GH, but English is very accommodative when it comes to alternate spellings coupled with weird pronunciations. So you're right.

So one you hear a lot is buck naked or people say butt naked. And it isn't butt naked. It's buck naked. Right. That's a really interesting – it actually shows a linguistic change. What happens a lot of times is a buck they think came from buckskin. And it might have been referring to indigenous or slaves who wore buckskin and they didn't wear many clothes. But what happens a lot of times in language is that buck naked, by the time you cut to the 1800s, late 1900s, it doesn't sound, we don't really think of buckskin or buck.

But we do think of butt naked. Butt naked is evocative. So we think of it. So therefore it changed. It's called an acorn. It changes in a logical way to something that makes much more sense. Another one is dull as ditch water it used to be. But most of us don't see ditch water that much. So in the 1930s and 40s, it began to change to dishwater. This one I'm always curious about

because it's G-I-F for, you know, basically a computer image. People say GIF or some people say JIF. And it seems to me, I mean, I say GIF. I think when I see that word, that's what I think of. And you say it's JIF. But according to who?

I mean, so what? This is the problem. The person who invented the process said it's GIF. We all say, GIF, what do you do? Now, we got a lot of calls on this one. And people were correct. It really is GIF despite what the inventor said jif stands for graphics interchange format and it makes sense to say it's a gif but we but we as humans

consensus decided it was jif and wilhite the the inventor, still insists. We had like, I think it was 2013, he was saying it's GIF, not GIF. But if consensus is correct, then why do you in your book say GIF is the correct pronunciation? That's a good question, too. As I said, for fun, we've included words in here for fun or to show the idea of debate about a language and how words change, et cetera. And, you know, we both say gif. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And we were just trying to show here what happens when people, despite what you say or do, language change. Tolkien, for example, J.R. Tolkien, he pronounced his name Tolkien.

He's dead. And I love his books and I love the movies, but I say J.R.R. Tolkien. I don't say Tolkien despite what he said. Were he alive and were he still, I was talking to him, I probably would pronounce his name correctly. One word that the correct pronunciation, I think most people wouldn't even know what you're talking about is fort instead of forte. Forte is one of those words that seems that that is become the default correct pronunciation, even if it is technically incorrect. That's one where I always say his strength is. Let's go through that. Forte in music is F-O-R-T-E, and it's correctly pronounced Forte.

When you're talking about someone's strength or ability, it's again spelled F-O-R-T-E, and technically it should be pronounced fort. Comes from the French. It should be pronounced fort, not forte, but virtually everyone pronounces it forte. So here you get into a dilemma if you're... This is at the very knife's edge, so to speak, or sword's edge of language change. It's changing and generally accepted to

say forte. Now, if you go to the dictionaries, the original pronunciation would have been fort. So what do you do? On one hand, if you say fort correctly, half the room is going to say it should be forte. If you say, well, his forte is something, the other half is going to go, it should be fort. In that case, I would basically, if I were speaking formally or whatever, I would go for his strength is X, Y, or Z and not say, uh, fort or forte. Is regardless and irregardless, if they mean the same thing, isn't one of them unnecessary?

Irregardless is unnecessary. It's generally assumed to be incorrect. But so many people say it, it's now entered the dictionary. It's really a double negative because the I in the front makes it not regardless, which means not not regard. So it's incorrect even grammatically. But English has double negatives too. So I I mean, you know, even though they're technically incorrect, a lot of people use them. So, again, this is another case where consensus is occurring. I don't like irregardless at all. A lot of people don't mind it. And it's going to gradually, my bet would be it's coming into the language.

That's the key thing because we get calls from people, oh, you know, this is terrible, this is terrible. Problem is, despite what you think or I think, language is changing. What's a good example of a regional difference, that people in one region pronounce a word one way and somewhere else they pronounce it the other way? Well, you're from California, so you would pronounce it correctly. But here on the East Coast and in the Central states, we all pronounce Oregon, Oregon. And that drives Oregonians crazy. And I went a long time ago, I went on a book tour to Oregon.

And I said, I'm happy to be here in Oregon. And I've never had more corrections in my life on how to pronounce Oregon. And again, we go back to that's an interesting aspect of language change. I mean, of language. People like it when you pronounce stuff correctly, and they don't like it when you pronounce their home state or their hometown incorrectly. So I love Oregon, and I hope to go back, and I'm going to pronounce it correctly this time. Kind of like Louisville. Louisville, exactly. Although my favorite actually on that one is there is a river

in Connecticut, T-H-A-M-E-S. And I thought I had been in London earlier and I thought it was like the Thames in London, which is T-H-A-M-E-S. But in Connecticut, the settlers came earlier when the Thames was pronounced Thames. And that little river is called the Thames in Connecticut. Isn't that cool? I didn't know that. And I grew up in Connecticut. Must have been a different part of Connecticut. That must be a pretty small river. I'll have to look it up. Hey, this has been fun, Ross. I always like talking about language because it's always changing, and people have different theories and opinions and ideas of how to use it and what's correct, and it's always interesting to kind of get it all out on the table.

I've been speaking with Ross Petras. He is co-author of the book, You're Saying It Wrong, a pronunciation guide to the 150 most commonly mispronounced words and their tangled histories of Misuse. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks, Ross. Okay, thanks a lot. If you're bad with names, join the club.

It's a pretty common problem. There is something you can do to make names stick, and that is stop talking. In social situations, we naturally jump right into a conversation with someone that we're introduced to. When we do that, our brains skip right over the name and right into the subject matter. So the next time you're introduced to someone, pause. Take a moment to repeat the name to yourself and let it sink in. You can even slow things down a bit more by taking a second and asking them to repeat their name. Watch their mouth. Say the name out loud and you will remember it. And that is something you should know. Which brings us to the end of this episode.

I appreciate you listening and would really appreciate if you enjoyed the episode to tell someone you know and suggest they give a listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top ten lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennialial and i'm the dapper danielle on every episode of our fun and family-friendly show we count down our top 10 lists of all things disney the parks the movies the music the food the lore there is nothing we

don't cover on our show we are famous for rabbit holes disney themed games and fun facts you didn't know you needed i had danielle and and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either.

Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. Danielle, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying! I'm so sorry! You win that one! So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies

of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Redolph Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available.