Erin grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, but when she moved to New York City, she found that people often told her she pronounces Erin as if it’s spelled like the masculine name Aaron. Has Erin been pronouncing her own name wrong all these years? In parts of the United States, particularly the Western and Central states the pronunciation of the words marry and merry sound the same, but in the Northeast and Montreal they sound slightly different. Something similar to this merry-marry merger also happens with the names Erin and Aaron. In other words, it’s a dialectal difference. Speaking of pronouncing the name Aaron, check out Key & Peele’s “Substitute Teacher” sketch. This is part of a complete episode.
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
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