Today's episode is courtesy of the fantastic poet, Jason Snyderman.

Hang tight, and I'll be back on March 27th.

I'm Jason Snyderman, and this is the slowdown.

One of the weird things about language is that similar sounding words have very different meanings.

If you are looking for a lavatory, a laboratory will not do.

Having a prodigal child is caused for despair, but having a prodigy for a child is caused for

celebration. There's a book about speech recognition called How to Rec a Nice Speech.

Because that's what the computer heard, the first time it was asked to transcribe the phrase,

How to Recognize Speech. I spend a lot of time with people who are learning English,

so I've become attuned to some of the weirder aspects of the sounds of English.

Does it make sense that Tim and Tom are both names, but Jim and John are not? You tell me?

Of course, anything challenging can also be a source of pleasure, and using the wrong word

is a very old kind of joke, one that takes its name from Mrs. Malaprop, a character and a comedy

from the 1700s. Mrs. Malaprop, whose name is a play on the French for Miss Place,

says she hopes that her daughter will reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying,

and uses the word allegory when she means alligator. These so-called Malapropisms have never

gone away. Justin Bieber, for example, apparently thought that the Sistine Chapel was the 16th

Chapel, but in the 1800s, Sigmund Freud suggested using the wrong word might not just be a source of

humor, but could also give us a glimpse into the unconscious. He gave his own name to what is

now commonly called a Freudian slip, when someone says what they really mean or really want,

instead of the socially acceptable thing they meant to say. Today's poem starts with a conceit,

an idea or premise that motivates the poem. The speaker misreads the word fire as father.

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