Grammar girl here, I'm Minion Faggurdy.

This week I have two pronunciation corrections, a quick and dirty tip about making the phrase

attorney general plural, and a meaty middle about how to write good survey questions.

It's harder than it seems.

The tumultuous, ongoing saga of how to pronounce the word spelled T-U-M-U-L-T.

A couple of weeks ago I told you that it's pronounced tumult, and that's correct for

American English.

But all of you international listeners registered your displeasure because it's pronounced differently

in British English.

It has more of a y sound, like tumult, tumult, tumult.

So in American English it's tumult, and in British English it's T-U-M-U-T. I think.

I looked it up in the Collins dictionary which has a British focus.

I think from now on I'm just going to use the words strife, ruckus, or riot.

Although now I can't get tumult out of my mind, I heard someone pronounce it wrong in

another podcast last week, and Kelsey tweeted that she noticed the narrator of the wanderlust

audiobook pronounced it correctly.

So I'm sorry if you're now noticing tumult everywhere.

And I also pronounced another word wrong recently.

In the episode about the names of the months I told you that we got the Gregorian calendar

when Pope Gregory VIII issued a papal ball.

Except it should have been pronounced papal, not papal.

It's a papal ball.

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