Grammar girl here. I'm in yon folkry your friendly guide to the English

language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

But before we jump into this week's podcast,

I have not one, but two pronunciation corrections.

First, when I was telling my story about the NATO phonetic alphabet, the segment that keeps on giving,

I gave the example of N as Neanderthal, and then learned from a number of kind and amusing

listeners that I have been

pronouncing that word wrong my whole life. I said Neanderthal, but it is

actually pronounced Neanderthal or even Neanderthal, which is the first

pronunciation at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary and an alternative

pronunciation at dictionary.com but sounds very strange to me. I'm going to try to say it

Neanderthal from now on. The origin of the word is kind of interesting too.

The name comes from the Neander Valley in Germany where remains that were later called Neanderthals were discovered.

But what's cool is that Neanderthals means new man and Neanderthals were essentially a new kind of Neander just a coincidence. According to Edam online, the Neander Valley is named after Yoakum Newman, a German

pastor who loved visiting this valley in the 1670s.

Neander is a Greek interpretation of Newman, apparently because it was common at the time

for educated Germans to adopt classical forms of their surnames, getting all fancy with the Greek.

But what a coincidence.

Second, my O as in the Orangutan example also had a pronunciation problem. I pronounce the word

orang a tang, but if you look at the spelling, there is no G at the end. Again, in

this case, Miriam Webster and Dictionary.com disagree about which

pronunciation comes first and which is an alternative. But in this case, at least

...