Members of our Facebook group are inventing funny names for Greek gods by mispronouncing familiar words with the accent on the wrong syllable, such as Episodes /eh-PIH-suh-deez/, god of continuing stories, and Lemonades /leh-moe-NAH-deez/, god of cool refreshment. There’s also Particles /PAR-tih-kleez/, god of little bits that get missed by the vacuum; Ankles /ANE-kleez/, god of podiatry; and Obstacles /AHB-stuh-kleez/, god of impediments. This game is a lot like Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle in which he and his imaginary friend Sophocles introduced us to other imaginary Greeks with similarly mispronounced names. For example, their friend who specializes in studying squid, octopi, and cuttlefish is named… Tentacles /TEN-tuh-kleez/. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Auricles, the God of Mispronouncing Words Like Names of Greek Deities”
You’re listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. On the Away With Words Facebook group, a recent thread had me laughing out loud. Remember Kathy Bird started it with a post that said simply, “Episodes, the Greek god of continuing stories. Keep it going.”
And I thought, what? Yeah, I finally figured out that she was mispronouncing episodes as epicides.
Oh, epicides. There we go. You know, putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.
And a lot of people chimed in, and pretty soon we had this whole pantheon of mispronounced English words that sound like Greek gods.
Stephen Fessler wrote, “Lamanides, the god of cool refreshment.” I said a lemonades.
Yeah. And Craig O’Connor said, “Particles, the god of little bits that get missed by the vacuum.” Particles. Particles.
And I like this one from Jay Banks. He said, “Anklees, the god of podiatry.”
Oh, that’s good. Anklees, ankles. Yeah, I love that.
And then Christine Porter suggested the god of impediments. Can you guess what that one is?
The god of obstakles?
Yes. Or obstakles, I guess. Obstakles.
We had a great quiz from John Chanesky on this very topic, turning everyday words into Greek names. We’ll link to that on our waywordradio.org website.
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