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.
Drother, an alteration of would rather in some American English dialects,
first appeared in writing in the late 1800s.
Anyway, you drother have it.
That is the way I drother 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 drother.
This example of meta-analysis, 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,