Posted on July 22, 2018 at 4:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek

Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty received some unexpected feedback from her episode on aggravate versus irritate.

It wasn’t questions or arguments, though. It was commentary on how she pronounced aggravate.

Many listeners were hearing the first syllable as “egg” versus “ag.”

So what’s up with that? It turns out it’s a dialect quirk known as the bag-beg merger.

Listen to an episode analyzing this phenomenon here.

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