AEE 2414: Why Do Native English Speakers Make This Mistake?
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This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2414. Why do native English speakers make this mistake?

Welcome to the All Ears English podcast, downloaded more than 200 million times. Are you feeling stuck with your English? We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection, not perfection with your American host, Aubrey Carter, the IELTS whiz.

and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA. And to get your transcripts delivered by email every week, go to allearsenglish.com forward slash subscribe. Can you say the word rethunk in English? Today, we answer a question from a listener who heard this and wants to know more. We get to the bottom of it today.

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Hey there, Aubrey. What's shakin'? I'm great. How are you, Lindsay? Oh, I'm doing well. I think we're gonna have a lot of fun today on All Ears English. This is gonna be fun. I have a question for you to start it out. What do you say when you realize that you made a mistake?

Oh, sometimes I say, duh, right? Yes. Oh, duh. How did I make that mistake? Or I do say my bad sometimes. And definitely I say, oops, whoops, oopsie, whoopsie. Right. There's a lot of options, actually, for sure. Yeah.

These are such silly and fun words. I'm excited to talk about them today. Is today's episode inspired by a listener question? Yes, we got this great question from Mauro. I'll read it for us. Okay. First of all, great episode on no pain, no gain. That was a good one. I remember that episode.

Oh.

Great question. No, it is not the past tense of rethink, but you also probably didn't hear it wrong. That's probably exactly what they said. Yes. And Mauro is doing all the right things by going out into the world and consuming natural native English. I love that. And so inevitably, you're going to hear weird things spoken when you do that. For sure. Right? It does happen.

But we're here to help. Don't worry, Mauro. Love it. Guys, go ahead and hit the follow button to make sure you don't miss a single episode of All Ears English. We publish five episodes a week just for you, and you want it to drop right into your queue. So just go ahead and tap that follow button, and you will get All Ears English to you five days a week. Love it. Awesome. Yes, be sure to hit follow, guys. All right, let's dive in here. There are two reasons that the person in this interview might have said re-thunk.

The first one is it might have just been a grammar mistake, but possibly a grammar error that is very common in their regional dialect. I have definitely heard this mistake. And sometimes by someone who doesn't realize it's a grammar error. Sometimes someone will say it and they realize it's a grammar error, but that's just what everyone who lives by them says. So they're used to it.

And again, you know, this is not the kind of thing that's going to be covered in any textbook. No textbook would take the time to talk about this, but we think it's important because you are going, you guys are immersing yourselves in real English. If you're traveling to the US or the UK, you're going to hear these things. Abra, you and I have been in debates here on the show about this topic, right? These intentional grammar mistakes and when should we do them? What company are we in?

Exactly. That's tricky because I want to ask you, Lindsay, I have definitely heard this grammar error where I grew up in the Northwest. But what about you, Lindsay? Have you ever heard someone say, "I re-thunk what I did," something like that? Yeah. I've heard, well, I've heard, "I thunk," right? As people mistaken, not knowing the past tense or mistakenly saying the wrong past tense of think, for sure. And it's cultural, right?

This is tough for me. I struggle with this.

So you can see how people might assume a word changes a certain way because of other words they've heard, irregular verbs, and they're trying to follow that pattern. So this does happen. Yeah. And other mistakes that we hear a lot, Aubrey, I mean, here's an example.

She's ran a lot this week. And again, just to be clear, this is a mistake, right? We should say she has run a lot this week, right Aubrey? Right, but that's tricky because past tense, she ran. But then if you're using present perfect and you need that past participle, it should be she has run a lot this week. I have run a lot this week. I hear this mistake all

the time. People who were from cities, from not, you know, but it is maybe more common in the West. There are a lot of past tense verbs that you'll hear errors with in the United States. Yeah. And again, we've talked on other episodes how maybe someone who lives in a Western town in a rural area would use the grammar mistake on the weekend at a barbecue and then they would go to work, let's say in the city and they would never use that mistake at work.

Right? Maybe. Sure. Maybe not, right? So I worked for a land developer here in Arizona. And I remember all the time, and a lot of them were from Phoenix or like California, and I would hear these errors with verbs all the time. Yeah. And it was like, you know, people are kind of trying to uplevel their language. Sometimes it's because they just don't realize it's a mistake. Yeah. And often it's because it's such a part of their regional dialect that

that it's like an accepted error. But then if they went to the East Coast, they might not hear that error very often. So for a lot of the episodes we've done here on All Ears English, we've shared with you which errors are more common, more accepted, and which are going to be

less common or sound more glaring that you'd want to avoid. This is one of those. Re-thunk, I don't recommend you say it because it's common in less areas. A lot of people who hear you say it would maybe be confused. Definitely recognize it as an error. So though you might hear someone say it, we wouldn't recommend it.

Yeah. So we're just going ahead and answering Mauro's question here. I also think it's not entirely East Coast, West Coast, East West. I think it's education level. I mean, I think it's fair enough to say that in one way. Education level would influence that. Where we live, who we're around, these are all factors that could influence that. I don't think it's as clean as saying in the East because, I mean,

Definitely there are parts on the East Coast you would hear these mistakes too. It's not just East West, right? It depends on the region, but sometimes it is education level and sometimes not, right? I have friends who have master's degree, PhD, and then when I go back home, they're still going to speak like everyone else around them so that they're not being judged for being hoity-toity, right?

condescending with their grammar. So you can't really make assumptions about education level either. So it's really interesting. So it's a combination of region, rural, urban, education, and who we're around, like we said, right? Who we're around and what our choices are in that moment. Do we choose to fit in or do we choose to say it correctly, right? So it's difficult. This is a hot topic. This is the nice one about rethink and rethunk is it is rare enough that we

Even if you hear other people in a certain area say rethunk once or twice, you can still say rethunk.

rethought or rethink we wouldn't even say I rethought about this would say I thought about this again we don't really say no we don't even although the other thing that's interesting although I do say I'll have to rethink that so we do say it in the present we just don't say it in the past exactly if we're going to say in the past I would say I you know was rethinking that I would either use past continuous

Or I rethought that. No, not I rethought. I thought about it again. That's what I would say. And I changed my mind. Yeah. I would say I thought about it again. Right. Or I revisited that in my mind. Exactly. And I changed my mind. Okay. Yeah. That's maybe where this rethunk is coming from because we don't really say rethought. So someone also hasn't heard that much. So in the split second, they're like, what do I say? Re-thunk? Hmm.

Tricky. All right, let's get back to it, Aubrey. So what else do we need to know here? This is really exciting. This is interesting. So the second thing is it might not be a grammar mistake.

or I guess it is a grammar mistake, but it might be intentional. Native speakers will sometimes say re-thunk or thunk as a joke, a self-deprecating humor, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what happens, it's because someone made some kind of decision or made an action that they then realized was not the correct decision, right? They're recognizing a mistake. Yes.

They're saying hindsight is 20-20. They're saying I should have done something different. And I'll hear them say something like, I thought what I thunk, but now I realize I was wrong. So they're intentionally making a grammar error to poke fun at themselves.

It's like they're literally like knocking themselves over the head as they say that. Like, I thought what I thunk, right? It's like, oh, I was so silly in that moment, right? Exactly. So that could be as well. It's like this chunk, like, oh, I need, I re-thunk what I did. And really what you're saying is, oh, I really made a big mistake there. Making fun of yourself, right? It's just self-deprecating. It's sarcastic in a way.

Okay. And then we want to share a couple other very quick options here. At the top, Lindsay, you said a lot of the things that we say when we realize we've made a mistake, right? Oof, oops, whoops, all of these. And then we have a couple that are less common that are very fun. One of them is derp.

So let's do a little mini role play. I'll start us what this would look like. I think you left your water bottle at my house, Lindsay. Oh, derp. I leave that thing everywhere. Nice. Derp. It's funny, but it's the same as like, oops, whoops. Oh, my bad. Right. They all mean the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. And this next one, doy was very hot in the 90s, I think. So here's the next one, Aubrey. Yeah. Start us out. Right. It looks like the restaurant closed an hour ago. Oh.

Oh, doi. I should have looked up their hours before we drove here. So it means the same as like, duh. Oh, duh. It just means like I made a mistake. Maybe it's like a variation off of duh. Like we had duh and then we created doi as a way of just enhancing that. I don't know. These are strange. I think Lindsay and I both remember from the 90s would say no doi and it was the same as no duh, which is a way of saying like, that's obvious. Like I already knew that. No duh. No doi.

Yeah. And if you ever said that to your parents as a teenager, I know my parents would definitely be mad at me. Mine would be mad too. Like what did you just say? So funny. I have learned after so many years as an entrepreneur that speed matters when it comes to hiring, but so does quality. You need the most qualified person on your team fast. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites.

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Okay, Aubrey, let's bring all this into a role play. Here I'm asking you about a recent vacation. Okay, you start us out. Did you swim with sharks like you were hoping to? No, I re-thunk that and decided not to. I don't blame you. I don't think I could do that. Bummer is I didn't change my mind in time to get my money back. So I was like, oh, derp, goodbye deposit.

So you're really poking fun at your own misjudgment here, let's say, right? Exactly right. When you hear this, and you might hear this, I am very intentionally making bad grammar to say, I don't know what I was thinking swimming with sharks. I decided not to do that. It was a mistake. Yes. Oh, I'm the type of person that would use bad grammar. I did something so silly, right? And that's when you say, I re-thunk it.

Right. So in that choice of grammar, you're actually saying I'm so silly, right? Is what you're doing. Exactly. So there's this implied meaning, like I'm intentionally using this to self-deprecate. Right. So this is not, you know, this is not so much the scenario where we want to speak like the people around us or that we don't know the grammar, right? This is the third scenario where you're actually making fun of yourself in your word choice, right?

Exactly. It's this idiomatic chunk that you're intentionally using this. So when Mauro heard this on an interview, it's impossible to know actually if it was a grammar mistake, it might have been, and they just used the wrong past tense verb. Or if they were intentionally saying, you know, saying this sort of poking fun at themselves saying, I had this whole plan and that did not work out. So I re-thunk the whole process. Maybe. Yeah.

Yep. So that's the grammar choice you use there. And then you said, so I was like, oh, derp, goodbye deposit. So again, it's like the face smash, right? You're like, I'm so silly. I can't believe I did that. Exactly. And here we're narrating thoughts, right? I probably didn't actually say this. I'm like, oh, I was like, oh, derp, goodbye deposit. I just thought this like, whoops, I made a big mistake.

Yes, exactly. I love it. Aubrey, is there another episode our listeners should go over to listen to right now? Yes, there is a great episode over on the Business English Podcast 380. Very recent, Accidents Happen, How to Say You Made a Mistake at Work.

And this, so it's interesting because yes, we do this in everyday conversations. We have these words that we use when we make a mistake, when we're trying to make it more lighthearted. And then we have some different phrases that we use at work. So if you work in English, don't miss that episode. Yeah. I mean, we wouldn't necessarily recommend these phrases at work that we taught today. Don't you think Aubrey? No, much too informal. And we probably wouldn't say accidents happen in a daily conversation. That's much more common at work.

Yes. All right. Good stuff. So there's a lot for our listeners to think about. This has actually been a very high level episode because we're talking about

using sarcasm. We're talking about making fun of ourselves in our choice to make a grammatical mistake, Aubrey. We're talking about regional differences, educational differences. There's so much here. I love it. Yes, right? A lot to think about. We always try to let you guys know when we share about a common native grammar error. Should you be making that mistake too or not? We want you to have all of that info because this can be confusing when you hear native English speakers making these grammar mistakes.

Really good stuff. Thanks for bringing this topic to the show today, Aubrey. And guys, go ahead and hit that follow button right now to get five days a week of all ears English. All right. Awesome. Good stuff. Thanks, Lindsay. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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