It's the Word of the Day podcast for April 14th.

Today's word is Druthers, spelled D-R-U-T-H-E-R-S.

Druthers is a plural noun.

It's an informal word that refers to the power or opportunity to

choose, in other words, free choice. It's used especially in the phrase if one had one's druthers.

Here's the word used by Drew Hancock quoted in variety. If I had my druthers, if I made the

sequel to Companion, it would just be a shot of her on the side of the road,

cutting out her tracking chip and then cutting to her on a farm with a couple of million dollars.

Nowadays, you're much more likely to encounter the plural noun druthers than its singular forebear.

But that wasn't always the case. Druther, an alteration of

would rather in some American English dialects, first appeared in writing in the late 1800s.

Anyway, you druther have it. That is the way I druther have it, says Huck to Tom in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.

Detective, a sequel to the more famous adventures of Tom Sawyer, which also included the word druther.

This example of metanalysis, the shifting of a sound from one element of a phrase to another,

had been around for some time in everyday speech when Twain put those words in Huck's mouth.

By then, in fact, druthers had also become a plural noun, so Tom could reply,

There ain't any druthers about it, Huck Finn. Nobody said anything about druthers.

Though Druthers didn't overtake druther in popularity, at least in print, until the mid-1900s.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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