Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson and Floyd Mayweather Jr. (Jemal Countess / Ethan Miller / Getty Images) Right on heels of our last post, Shame and Literacy, comes this doozy. Rapper 50 Cent has challenged Floyd Mayweather, who many consider the best pound-for-pound boxer in the universe, to appear on Jimmy Fallon's late night TV show and read the Dr. Suess classic "Cat in he Hat." If he does so successfully 50 Cent will donate $750,000 to a charity of Mayweather's choosing. The two former business partners had a falling out and are now duking it out on social media. First 50 Cent challenged Mayweather...
Rapper’s Delight: A Strong Vocabulary
click here for hi-res version Matthew Daniels has created a pretty nifty flow chart with Pop Chart Lab ranking the size of the vocabulary of today's leading hip-hop artists. Daniel explains the project: Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake. 35,000 words covers...