Everyone knows someone who says “expresso” instead of “espresso,” or swears a movie sequel is really a “sequence.” Most of us let it slide. Kurt Ronnow wrote it down.

In his new book, Fox Paws: And Other Stupid Things You Shouldn't Say But Probably Do, Ronnow has assembled a wildly entertaining field guide to the words, phrases, and mangled idioms that slip out of otherwise perfectly intelligent mouths every day. The title itself is the thesis: the phrase is faux pas, not “fox paws,” and if you've ever said it wrong, congratulations — you're exactly who this book is for.

The premise is deceptively simple. Over years of listening closely to coworkers, neighbors, newscasters, police reports, and his own occasional slip-ups, Ronnow started cataloging the moments when language went sideways. The result is part comedy routine, part linguistic autopsy: hundreds of entries, each one a small crime scene where a word almost survived and didn't.

Some entries are simple mispronunciations — the reader who insists “semantics” is spelled without the “n,” or the neighbor who pronounces the h in “herbs.” Others are more ambitious disasters entirely of the speaker's own invention, like the man who, corrected about his kidneys, indignantly protested that he wasn't a botanist. And some are simply poetry by accident: a police report describing a house “ridiculed with bullets,” or a caller anxious about needing to dial “921” instead of 911.

What keeps Fox Paws from reading like a scolding style guide is Ronnow's refusal to spare himself. He includes his own missteps right alongside everyone else's — a mangled “paradigm,” a “Valenzuelan” instead of a Venezuelan — and owns each one with the same deadpan humor he turns on his subjects. The effect is less “grammar police” and more “friend who happens to notice everything and can't help but write it down.”

The book lands at a moment when language is shifting faster than ever — texting, autocorrect, and casual speech are reshaping how we write and talk in real time. Fox Paws doesn't try to stop that tide. It just wants you to laugh at it, and maybe wince a little when you recognize yourself in it.

For readers who love word play, overhear terrible puns at family dinners, or have ever confidently said the wrong thing in a meeting and only realized it later, Fox Paws is a guilty-pleasure read — the kind of book you can't help but read passages of out loud to whoever's in the room.

“This is the linguistic equivalent of having someone point out something in your teeth”
Fox Paws: And Other Stupid Things You Shouldn't Say But Probably Do, by Kurt Ronnow, is available now.

Kurt Ronnow is the author of Fox Paws: And Other Stupid Things You Shouldn't Say But Probably Do.