the little star that we use as a typographical convention.

And the word is "asterisk."

When I say that word, I have to actually slow myself down, because

"asterisk" is not how I say that word. I say "asteriks."

And I became very aware of this a few weeks ago,

when I was teaching Indo-European,

in which we use that little star to mark reconstructed forms,

to mark forms for which we have no evidence.

So multiple times in the lecture, I had to say

"asterisk," except more than half the time I said "asteriks."

The students, of course, pointed this out to me--

that I had two pronounciations.

And I said, "Well I only say 'asterisk' when I'm being careful."

We have a word in linguistics for this

process of switching sounds--in this case s and k--called

"metathesis," and there are many examples in

English of sounds switching places like this.

One example is "bird," which used to be "brid."

And "third" used to be "thrid," which actually makes much more sense,

because then you can see the relationship with "three."

Now the one that people are often surprised about is that

"asked" used to be "aksed."

Many people assume it goes the other direction: that it was

"ask" and then some people started saying "aks."

But actually "aks," as in

"aks a question," is older, and in fact Chaucer uses

"aks" in the Wife of Bath's Tale.

So in that case, we had a "ks" changed to an "sk."

In "asterisk" we are taking an "sk" and changing it to a "ks."

So next time you go to the drugstore and you realize you're asking for a

"perscription" instead of a

"prescription," just realize that you're participating

in this process called metathesis, and you're not the only one.