Catina from Abilene, Texas, says her young daughter and her friends fondly refer to each other with the word sigma. The slang terms sigma and sigma male were originally used in the manosphere to denote “an outsider,” and carried a somewhat derogatory sense. In the manosphere, an alpha is someone who is dominant, deriving from the mistaken belief that wolf packs have a single alpha figure, and a beta is someone who is not dominant. By 2010, sigma had left the manosphere and has since acquired a more positive connotation. 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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