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PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous

I admit I LOL'd at the part about lighting up "like a Christmas tree." WATCH AND LEARN all IDWs!

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The Brian Ferguson Interview
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Thursday, October 17, 2019

Get off Jerry Coyne's lawn, whippersnappers

Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker's fanboy recently seen defending the IDW project to negate history, wants you to know he'll have none of this slang nonsense:

1.) “tea” as in “gossip” or “dirt”. “Spill the tea” is now the equivalent of “tell all” or “spill it”. The Urban Dictionary gives an example:
“Girl, did you know Renee is having ANOTHER baby? And the babby daddy is the same guy who she found out has been cheating on her!”
“OMG, spill the tea on that drama!!!!”
An example from this article in HuffPo:
to wit:Demi Moore’s new memoir is giving you all the tea you could possibly want about her life and then some.
 
This is odious. Why can’t they just say “juicy details” or “gossip”. The word “tea” here is the verbal equivalent to virtue flaunting—it’s “I’m with-it” flaunting. I have no use for such people.

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"spill the tea" derives, like much of American slang, from African American vernacular

How dare they invent a term of which a race science-promoting old white man does not approve!

Just wait until he hears about that "jazz"!
A strange word has gained wide-spread use in the ranks of our producers of popular music. It is "jazz," used mainly as an adjective descriptive of a band. The group that play for dancing,  when colored, seem infected with the virus that they try to instil as a stimulus in others. They shake and jump and writhe in ways to suggest a return of the medieval jumping mania. The word, according to Walter Kinglsey, famous in the ranks of vaudeville, is variously spelled jas, jass, jasz, and jasez; and is African in origin....
Later on the article references the poem "Congo" which can be heard, read by author Vachel Lindsay here.

Click here to enlarge and read the article "The Appeal of the Primitive Jazz" from The Literary Digest, 1917. I found it online here.


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