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.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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