Linguist Stumped by New Soulja Boy Song
BOSTON—Thomas Fine, a linguistics professor at Harvard University, reported that he was “stumped for the first time in his life” after trying to analyze the words in Soulja Boy’s new single, “Trix be smackin my 24s, nah?” After a full perusal of the song’s lyrics, Fine concluded that the rapper’s lyrics “do not match up with any sort of language ever observed in the vast canon of human speech.”
Fine began his press release by speaking on Soulja Boy’s rhyme schemes. “In the second verse, Mr. Boy attempts to rhyme the words ‘hoes and bitches’ with ‘I throw them some fifties’. I have searched the Harvard database and there is no dialect known to man in which these words have even slightly similar phonetic construction.” The linguist also noted that approximately 75% of the rhymes consist of words ending in ‘ah’, such as ‘nah, ‘yah!’, and ‘cuzz ah’. “There are simply not enough words that end with this particular phoneme,” Fine noted, “that would make it possible for about half of these rhymes to be remotely original.”
In addition to nonsensical rhymes, Fine explained that Soulja Boy also displayed a perplexing lack of sentence construction abilities. “He constantly interrupts his sentences to interject with seemingly random shouts and hollers. For instance, he starts a line with ‘I say to the hunnies every day,’ which seems normal enough, but then continues “YUZ SAYS WHAT CHYA YAHIN IN MY GRILL,” which makes absolutely zero lexical sense.”
Fine’s final analysis reported 90% sentence fragments, 4 words per sentence, and a second grade reading level. “The most bizarre line in the song,” he said, “is the 3rd to last one. Mr. Boy raps, ‘I wanna chill around.’ Doesn’t he know that prepositions aren’t something you can end a sentence with?”