Rufus Wainwright sings that he wishes that the New York Times would publish “LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL” on its front page (THAT will never happen). I wish that newspapers would help literacy by correcting commonly mispronounced and misspelled words. So I’m starting my own campaign, and today we’ll start with

et cetera

My colleague Tom, and thousands of others insist on saying something like “excedera” instead of et cetera.

It’s Latin, and no you don’t have to know Latin to say this phrase. I can only think that baby boomers may be at fault. At the same time the aspirin product called “Excederin” came out in the early 6os, boomers were expanding their vocabulary and fused the two.