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Prompted by a listener email about pet peeves, we'll look at redundant phrases people use every day, and talk about how sometimes redundancy... can be good?

It's time for the airing of grievances! We'll toss around our least favorite examples of business jargon and PR puffery—it's a good, old-fashioned gripe session for Christmas. And speaking of Christmas, here's something a little more festive with last year's discussion of holiday-related terms and phrases: Merry, Gentlemen? Even Dickens Got It Wrong See you in the new year!

We dig into the second half of our holiday feast with some pasta, hot and cold soups, ancient grains, and even a little digestif. Plus, we'll take another dip into jus... or au jus, as the case may be. Bon appetit!

It's a cornucopia of delights! A feast for the... mouth? Ears? Whatever words are a feast for. We'll scarf down a Brazilian berry, a flaky French treat, and some delicious little potato pastas, while trying not to get yelled at by our Greek waiter. How exactly do you say all of these delicacies? We'll also take a little detour and look at the unexpected origins of a recently announced word of the year.

This time out we're going to get nice and cute and have a little fun with some words that were born on the wrong side of the tracks, but found the path to redemption.

Horse jumping, goats fighting hedgehogs, rude fruit-related gestures... today we look at some of the most surprising and exciting word origins we can think of.

We're continuing on from the last episode's fun and games, but the difficulty is ramping up!

Well, actually Nine Egregious Errors, but Eight looks better, and one of them isn't really THAT bad. We'll look at some of the most common language mistakes, even in major publications, that might make your eyes pop out of your head. But... are they really a big deal?

Find out what happens when perfectly nice words fall in with the wrong crowd...

OK, the time has come to talk about OK, OK? OK!

They're just two small, simple words. But when you put them together... all bets are off.

"She was probly at interpetive dance class at the libry that Febuary fifteenth." No? No good? Try saying it out loud...

It's our 50th podcast extravaganza! We'll talk about the current bête noire of the language world, "irregardless", as well as other redundancies and ways language may be changing for better or worse. Plus, a hodgepodge (or mishmash, or olio, or potpourri, take your pick) of listener pet peeves and whatever else might be on our minds. We can do what we want, we're 50 now.

"The Warmth of the Athletic Hamster." This is the sentence Fletcher received from Kathy and Ross. Say it aloud, and you'll probably hear epenthesis, the pronunciation of letters that are not there: "p" in warmth and hamster, perhaps an extra "a" in athletic . This discussion prompts the trio to recall instances where they've heard others mispronounce words through epentheses: Fletcher revisits elementary school, though he won't name names; and Ross and Kathy... well, sorry, Uncle Jim.

Grab some aspirin and try to wrap your head around the sloppy Venn diagram of homonyms, homophones, homographs, heteronyms, heterographs, polysemes... confused yet? So are we...

Why do some words sound pleasing while others feel ugly? Listen along as Kathy, Ross, and Fletcher try to work out: Is beauty in the ear of the beholder?

Do you have a smile that gleams and glistens and glows? Does the snot in your snout make you sneeze? Was that a slimy slug that just slithered by? Wait a minute—it seems like there's something going on here...

Two weeks ago, we had so much fun with French phrases, we figured, "why not do Latin?" Fletcher has some thoughts about why not to do Latin.

Is the entire French language Kathy's bête noire? Will Fletcher come up with le mot juste? Or will this whole thing just fill Ross with ennui? La partie commence!

This episode brought to you by the letter "Q." Well, "Qu." Because we don't know any English words that just start with "Q."