Antipodes and Grooks Minicast - 22 Sept. 2008

A listener in Brazil challenges Martha's pronunciation of the odd English word antipodes. Their email exchange leads Martha to muse about a favorite collection of poems, where she first encountered this word.<br/><br/>...<br/><br/>Recently on our show, I made a linguistic boo-boo. Did you catch it?<br/><br/>We were talking about the word 'podium.' A listener named Joel called to say that the word 'podium' originally denoted something you stand on. But more and more, people are using it to mean something you 'stand behind.' Joel was none too happy about that.<br/><br/>I told him he was right about the roots of the word 'podium,' even though its meaning has changed. <br/><br/>M: I feel your pain Joel. Absolutely, podium comes from ultimately from a Greek word meaning 'foot.' <br/><br/>G: Yeah, but that doesn't mean -- <br/><br/>M: Hear me out. Hear me out! It's like podiatrist, the doctor who looks after your feet. It's like antipodes, the people on the other side of the world from us, exactly. There's a big old foot in that word.<br/><br/>J: There sure is!<br/><br/>Did you catch my mistake? One of our listeners in Brazil did. Luciano emailed from Sao Paolo to say I'd mispronounced that word for people on the other side of world. A-n-t-i-p-o-d-e-s, he wrote, isn't pronounced 'ANN-ti-poads.' It's 'ann-TIP-uh-dees.' <br/><br/>- he's right! 'Ann-TIP-uh-dees' means, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: 'Those who dwell directly opposite to each other on the globe, so that the soles of their feet are, as it were, planted against each other.'<br/><br/>It's a poetic word, 'ann-TIP-uh-dees,' those Greek roots conjuring an image of people standing sole to sole, yet separated by an entire planet. The English word 'ann-TIP-uh-dees' was originally plural in form, referring to lots of people. The singular version, 'ANN-tih-poad,' came only later, by a process linguists call back-formation.<br/><br/>In any case, my only excuse for mispronouncing the word is this: In elementary school, I'd seen that singular form, 'ANN-tih-p