Alvin in Huntsville, Alabama, is a fan of the multipurpose noun chumpie, which he learned from a native Philadelphian. He remembers hearing it on the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, when actor Will Smith, who is originally from Philadelphia himself, would say things like Yo! That chumpie is fly! Like the word jawn, which is also closely associated with Philadelphia, chumpie functions largely as a placeholder word that can be applied to lots of different things. The use of this slang term goes back at least to the 1980s and perhaps farther than that. In the early 1990s, a Black-owned Philadelphia company began producing Chumpies potato chips. This is part of a complete episode.
According to Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Bookshop|Amazon) by Ben Yagoda, the word smarmy, meaning “unctuous” or “ingratiating,” may come from a 19th-century magazine contest, in which readers sent in...
Mary Beth in Greenville, South Carolina, wonders: Why do we say four-oh-nine for the number 409 instead of four-zero-nine or four-aught-nine? What are the rules for saying either zero or oh or aught or ought to indicate that arithmetical symbol...
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