Archive for the ‘language’ Category

The Hundreds of Ethnic Minority Groups Make It Really Hard to Be Politically Correct With Your Racism

In the 1970s there were three television channels: CBS, NBC and ABC. If you had a show on the air, take an average episode of M*A*S*H for example, you would pull in a bare minimum of twenty million viewers. There weren’t a lot of choices and nobody cared. People didn’t pine for a thousand channels [...]

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Do Somali Pirates Appreciate Pirate Jokes?

This post might be a little tricky to pull off due to only a nascent understanding of puns in the native Somali language, but I wonder if Somalia has some version of their own pirate jokes to regale their future raiders and crusaders like we have here. The first question has to be whether the [...]

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The Kyrgyzstan Revolt Is What Happens When Citizens Are Denied Vowels

The explosion in tensions in Kyrgyzstan this week showed how susceptible governments are if they oppress citizens and command a weak police presence. We have all learned that you can’t keep citizens from the vowels they deserve. I’m not exactly sure where Kyrgyzstan is located. I tried searching for it on Google Maps, but instead [...]

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Did Hollywood Stars Bet On Who Could Do The Worst Boston Accent?

Shutter Island opens today, which adds another to a long line of movies that for no apparent reason go unnecessarily out of their way to feature a star performing his rendition of a terrible Boston accent. Mark Ruffalo can finally join the ranks of Robin Williams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ben Affleck, Jack [...]

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Do Foreign Umbrella Salesmen in New York Always Yell At You Because They Don’t Have a Word for Umbrella?

Whenever it rains in New York, the street vendors come out in full force to hawk umbrellas, but I could never figure out why they were more aggressive with their sales pitch than any other person along Times Square. The knockoff wallet dude is always chill, sitting along the sidewalk playing dominoes with cell phone [...]

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