Just how do you pronounce Blink-182?
Well, rest assured, however you're saying the name of the 1990s rock band out of Poway, California, you're probably wrong. But the good news is you just might be right at the same time.
A heated, international debate erupted on Twitter earlier this week when Ian Karmel, a comedian and co-head writer from "The Late Late Show with James Corden" pronounced that the British were saying it wrong by calling the band "Blink One Eight Two":
Cool your jets, his boss told snapped back, admitting the people of his home country were mistaken, but so are Americans:
Then fans got involved, sticking up for the Scottish side in one case:
But things took a sharp turn when former and current band members began weighing in and founding member Tom DeLonge claimed it's "Blink eighteen-two":
We think he's got his tongue in his cheek, though.
Meanwhile, current member Mark Hoppus noted that an important detail was being left out of the conversation: Why was anyone capitalizing the "B"?
This is an ongoing esoteric discussion for band members, who have offered up all sorts of explanations for the numbers over the years. Originally, they'd been called Blink, but to avoid a legal battle with an Irish band of the same name, the record label made them change it.
Hoppus told Amy Schumer in an interview on Fuse's "Hoppus on Music" that the "182" was hastily added when label executives, tired of the band members procrastinating on a new name, threatened to use their own ideas.
"We just made up the 182 and ever since then we've made up stories all the time about what 182 means," he added. (For the record, he pronounces it "one eighty-two" during the chat.)
Meanwhile, in 2016 he told the BBC that it is "blink one-eighty-two," but that it's quite fine to say "one-eight-two" — but never "one-hundred-and-eighty-two" because it "just sounds wrong."
Of course, amid all of this kerfuffle, no one seems to wonder why the hyphen is in there.
Can we start that discussion now?