What? Why are you guys reading this as a slideshow? I’m reading it as one long scroll.

As someone who hasn’t watched SNL in years, this I how I imagine them trying to be topical:

Bad idea. South Carolina has been hoping for this excuse since 1832.

It was classy, because that was the kind of lady she was, but it was also expected of her. The other candidates that had run for the nomination like Muskie and Humphrey were also up there. Once the intra-party fight of the primary is done, people really do need to unite behind a candidate if they want to have any…

Some will.  The better ones have an adjustment you set for what material you are firing it at.

Thank you for the explanation. It does seem like Colbert’s cadence, and it might have sounded right in the writers head and just not translated well to print. I think it shows why editors are needed, to give writers an independent perspective about what works well and what doesn't.

This is a terribly constructed sentence:

Humph, I guess “1632" was passed over again.

You really think "Stairway to Heaven" would be worse with a saxophone than a clarinet?

That’s one way of reading it, but you can equally say that “despite learning lesson about racism from saintly black friend, white person still stupidly follows a leader that screws around and pretends rather than actually grants liberty.”

Junius Maltby is fun in its way.

Would I have been a peasant or an artisan? Yes. Would I have hated her on principle? I am not sure I would have had the education or class-consciousness. Do I identify with her class? No. Do we mostly read the stories of shitty nobles? Yes. Is she noteworthy because she is a woman? Maybe, but there are plenty of other…

Ha ha. What a moron. That makes the story (taken from a Tolkien biography) even better. We have all had some misguided teachers, but to make this a defining part of your "style" and then still get it wrong . . . 

Proof: Even J.R.R. Tolkien, who famously preferred English words to borrowed French ones (He had a schoolteacher who would berate a boy who used the term “manure”. “Call it muck! Say it three times, muck, muck, muck!”), used “Corsair” for the southern pirates from Umbar in The Lord of the Rings (presumably based on…

By that (modern) standard, almost every member of the nobility was just a blue-blooded thug. The Black Prince, Charles the Bold, Enguerrand de Coucy, it doesn’t matter. The significance of this story is that a woman could be as independant and vengeful as her forefathers and brothers.

The term you are looking for is “privateer”. The most famous English example would be Sir Francis Drake.

Yes! Whenever I hear an English person say they are going to fillet a fish, I immediately think they are going to put 1/4 inch radii on the four corners of it.

Yay! I'm already most of the way there.

It makes me think of mealworms.

You're kale-ing me Smalls!