Please Step to the Podium

And don't trip as you step up ONTO the podium and proceed to the LECTERN.

People, people - why is this so difficult?  Do perhaps 90% of all English-speaking folks abuse this word, maybe out of fear of sounding pompous or too literal by correctly choosing the word lectern?  Do people simply not care when they lazily copy others in the wrong application of the word podium?  Where is the intellectual curiosity these days?

As a high school student, making my first feeble attempt at learning a foreign language, I was so pleased to see the obvious root word for the various English words having to do with feet.  (I had missed any similar connection during an earlier strike-out year with Latin, which was even then being called a dead language when I was a dead-head trying to understand it!)  It was in my new venture into Spanish that I found the word Poder [poh - dare], meaning to walk.  The POD and PED variations, as in podiatrist and pedestrian, began to make sense to my slowly awakening interest in words.  The opportunity to take a course in etymology had never appeared in my school, so my lexologic interests had to be self-directed.  Any simple check in the dictionary shows the Greek podos, a word meaning foot, is obviously the main root for many words, including the English podiatrist and the Spanish poder.

So when I first ran across the word podium, it made complete sense that it had everything to do with where the feet were placed, not where a book or note paper would be placed.  That speaker's stand (which stands in front of the speaker, ON the podium) is a lectern, meaning desk, table, counter, stand, etc.  Check the word podium in a thesaurus.  It has many synonyms, all of them meaning where feet should go, not where hands go to turn pages of notes.  So when we hear a supposedly educated broadcaster say that "[so-and-so] is standing at the podium" - it is perfectly permissible to shout at the television screen that [so-and-so] is standing ON, not AT the podium!

In one of my sales jobs I was a presenter of information and that part of my work was referred to as doing podiums!  It isn't easy to express my disdain for this kind of abuse of words.  There was no podium at all; I stood merely in front of the patrons on floor level.  And as a strict point of usage, had I actually had a podium from which to speak, the act of doing many presentations from this raised platform should have been called in the plural, podia.  If we visit more than one museum or stadium, we are visiting musea and stadia.  Now I never get too riled up or vociferous when someone says he or she visited three museums; the handling of foreign words and their variations is not an easy matter.  (The stadia and musea references even tripped up my spell-check.)  But the typical use of a wrong word as a habit is just a sign of lazy repetition and having no determination to speak with clarity.

My first question above was whether perhaps 90% of us misuse the term podium.  Of the remainder of society, perhaps only a tiny fraction are bothered by it.  Obviously I am in this latter group.

Someday I will tackle the even more completely misapplied word only in probably 99% of our speaking.