A napron? What's a napron?

<a href='http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=180241142'>Image via Shutterstock</a>

You're mispronouncing a lot of English words and that's OK, David Shariatmadari writes in the Guardian. Words like "apron" and "umpire" lost their initial consonants in a process linguists call "rebracketing." "Metathesis" turned brids into birds and a waps into a wasp. "Today's mistake could be tomorrow's vigorously defended norm," Shariatmadari writes. "There are lots of wonderful examples of alternative pronunciations or missteps that have become standard usage."

April 1, 2014

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