One of the stranger things I've noticed on Gawker is the tendency toward this weird super liberalism that manages to start dictating black reality to black people.

lose my shit

I don't know. I think you might be blowing smoke up my ass.

"If I wanted smoke blown up my ass, I'd be at home with a pack of cigarettes and short length of hose."

I'm sure it worked 100% on people who were only pretending to be dead.

Little known fact, in the Eighteenth Century, the word we know today as "suffocated" was pronounced, "fuffocated" and "successful" was "fufuccefsful."

You still don't have to go far afield in England to have a distinctive or almost unintelligible accent from one's countrymen. One of the funniest pub nights I've had is when my Welsh, Cockney, and North Yorkshire friends met for the first time. Every other word was "wat?" for the first few rounds. When a friend of…

I understand that somewhere between Chaucer and Shakespeare the sounds for e and a switched places. So the line in Chaucer we read as "Tee hee, quoth she" would have been pronounced "Tay hay, quoth shay." I also understand that English's infuriating spelling occurs because another series of pronunciation changes were…

You are forgetting about the Great Vowel Shift, which happened between 1350 and 1700. The farther you go back, the more unintelligible your accent will seem to the locals.

Just found another McWhorter article on this, similar to one of the links I posted. He clearly agrees with us:

Some of that would depend on how used to dealing with different types of English you are. Some people aren't good at listening to a Scottish English accent (let alone Scots), or a strong Mississippi African American accent, so they might struggle with Early Modern English in the early 17th century. The sound changes…

From my understanding we would be able to understand spoken Middle English much easier then someone from that time could understand Modern English.

Spoken English becomes basically recognizable a generation or two after the Norman Conquest. I actually find Chaucer-era Middle English easier to hear than to read.

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Barely get by in Shakespeare's time. Interestingly, it's McWhorter who's recently discussed how incomprehensible Shakespeare is in two articles:

Old English has more in common with German than modern English these days. You could probably just about get by in Shakespere's time, but I doubt you could go much further.

I'm fairly convinced at this point that a cure is not too far out—for pretty much any and all types of cancer. Twenty years or so. That is, obviously, a very long time for those affected or afflicted by cancer, however, and the human toll between now and then will still be far too high.

I doubt it will lead to a cure, but it will almost certainly make for better treatments, targeted interventions, and more efficient use of services. For example, it's much easier to sort out who needs to see a genetic counsellor right the fuck now when you know which patients' families have a higher risk of certain…

Sounds good but you forget a key thing: The current mantra of the GOP is "Obama wants it, it's bad for America."

There are still 72 days before this starts? Fuck you, time.

50 shades of rap...er...grey was started as fan fiction. Someone thought it would be cool if Stephanie Meyers' characters bumped uglies and stopped drinking blood. Apparently at first it was just put up on a website for free. Look what happened there. "I would if..." is book cancer. Just do it!