We hear them all the time — those mispronounced words and confused phrases that make us want to correct our friends and co-workers and sometimes even complete strangers (let’s face it, it’s an occupational hazard of being a word wonk).

Since we don’t want to get into heated arguments with friends or strangers (which would probably just lead to more misused words or even fistfights), most of us have the good sense to just let these phonetic flubs go. But we can still wonder about just why others utter mixed metaphors, contrived cliches and sometimes comically mispronounced words.

Fortunately for us, Robin Young and Karyn Miller-Medzon of Boston’s WBUR radio came to the rescue in a recent edition of their “Here & Now” program for which they interviewed Ariel Goldberg of Tufts University’s Psycholinguistics and Linguistics Lab.

Goldberg points out that the cause of most misunderstood words can be attributed to either the way we read words or the way we hear them. “ People are mispronouncing the words because they are reading them, creating a pronunciation based on what they’re reading that is different than what we are saying. The mispronunciation comes from the way that they assign a pronunciation to the word that they’re reading.”

“Another thing,” she notes, “is, we don’t mark (in our written language) which syllable is stressed, and so in the case of ‘awry,’ (which can be mispronounced as “ari”) it’s not clear whether the first syllable or the second syllable would be stressed, and so that could lead to additional errors.”

If you’re a regular viewer of the TV game show “Jeopardy!,” you’ve no doubt seen very smart contestants completely mangle the pronunciation of a key word in their response. To me it seems reasonable to assume that those people acquired a lot of their word-hoard (vocabulary) through reading, which, of course, is an excellent way of doing it — except for the occasional pronunciation problem. (Players usually seem to get credit for their responses as long as they don’t change a vowel or add or delete a syllable.)

Mischievous (MIS-chuh-vus), epitome (eh-PIT-oh-mee), and defibrillator (de-FIB-rill-a-tor) are among the most commonly cited mispronounced words in English.

We also have the tendency to misunderstand some of the words that we hear from time to time. The title of this particular “Here & Now” segment happened to be “Escape goats? Carpool tunnel syndrome? The science of mispronounced words.”

“What I think is really interesting about an ‘escape goat,’” says Goldberg, “is that when we are hearing speech, there’s no spaces between the words. So, what we’re doing when we’re hearing speech is we’re hearing the stream of sounds and we have to try to figure out where the boundaries are. We have a little bit of uncertainty where one word ends and where another word begins and that provides a place where we might insert other kinds of knowledge. Like ‘scape’ doesn’t seem like much to us but the word ‘escape’ is meaningful.”

Not only is “escape” meaningful to us, it also happens to be the correct word to associate with “scapegoat” — or at least it used to be. It seems that many centuries ago, there was a Jewish tradition of sacrificing one goat to atone for the sins of the people and letting another “escape” into the wilderness. In 1530, Protestant scholar William Tyndale christened the one that got away the “escape goat,” a term that has since evolved into “scapegoat.”

“ These are very common mistakes,” says Goldberg. “English spelling does not represent sounds completely. And also one other reason why we should not feel upset is that this has happened in the course of the history of English, and we’ve actually kept some of those words. For instance, enough English speakers thought that “napron,” the French word for “apron,” sounded too much like “an apron” so the word eventually got shortened to just “apron.”

All this talk of misheard stuff brings to mind several other ways of misunderstanding some of the things we’re listening to, such as mondegreens (also known as oronyms), which are misunderstood words or phrases usually from a song. (“Hold me closer, Tony Danza” anyone?) There are also spoonerisms and metathesis which involve the transposition of sounds or syllables in words or short phrases (saying “belly jeans” instead of “jelly beans” for instance). And let’s not forget malapropisms (words that are accidentally — or intentionally — used in place of similar-sounding correct words, sometimes for comic or dramatic effect).

But those are another can of germs all together.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at [email protected].