Andy from Kensington, Maryland, wonders about the word sycophant. Among the ancient Greeks, a blackmailer or someone who maliciously prosecuted others was a sykophantēs, a word that comes from the Greek sykon, meaning “fig,” and phainein, “to show.”...
If you mistype something, that’s a typo. But what do you call it when your voice-to-text program mistypes as you’re dictating? Is that a mico, as in microphone? Plus, the word sycophant has a long and surprising history that goes all the way back to...
