An amateur herpetologist in Tucson, Arizona, notes that there’s a raging debate among his fellow reptile enthusiasts about the term in situ, which is Latin for “in place.” Is it “in SIT-too,” “in SITCH-yoo,”...
Answers to our online survey of some 2500 respondents suggest that some 10 percent of English speakers pronounce both as “bolth,” and there’s apparently no regional component to this pronunciation marked by what linguists call an...
Jodie in Norfolk, Virginia, reports that a new restaurant there serving New Haven-style pizza is called District Apizza, pronounced “ah-BEETS.” The word apizza is a remnant of the language of Italian immigrants who settled in...
Joan from Dallas, Texas, wants to know why some people are judgmental about people who speak with a glottal stop in such words as cattle, bottle, or even glottal itself. She noted a commenter on TikTok criticizing a Scottish woman for pronouncing...
Why don’t we pronounce the letter b in the word subtle? The word derives ultimately from Latin subtilis, meaning “fine, delicate,” and was adopted into Middle English from Old French as sotil. The b was later added back in so that...
Americans pronounce the letter Z like “zee,” while those in other English-speaking countries say “zed.” That’s because Noah Webster proposed lots of Americanized pronunciations and this is one of the few that stuck...