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I cannot grade this until you have it completed and until you sort this out. Please see my Padlet and the "To Do" list if you need help. You can also stop in if you need more clarification.

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The padlet activities point out very valuable things to Shakespeare. They are telling us how some words we use today has different meanings than today. It also tells us that Shakespeare worded his plays to a beat, and hints us on how to read it best. The movie Box Trolls uses a lot of Elisabethian language on the side, and its kind of making me used to wording like that.

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lyrics:

No one on the corner have swagger like us

Swagger like us, swagger swagger like us

No one on the corner have swagger like us

Swagger like us, swagger swagger like us

No one on the corner, Mr. West is in the building

Swagger on a hundred thousand, trillion (No one on the corner)

Thought question:

What does the artist mean when he says, “No one on the corner have swagger like us?”

What is the significance of the word “Swagger”?

Complete this graphic organizer on your own paper (but be prepared to upload it later completed to your Padlet):

Swagger Article Questions-2.docxPreview the documentView in a new window

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"No one on the corner has swagga like us," sang rapper M.I.A. in her global hit "Paper Planes." The song was later sampled by T.I. and Jay Z in their hit song "Swagga Like Us." A few years before that, it was Jay-Z who declared "I guess I got my swagger back" on his 2001 album The Blueprint.

The word swagger should be a familiar term to anyone who has listened to popular hip-hop songs in recent years; a recent search on Rap Genius turned up more than a thousand songs that used the word in the lyrics.

Given those stats, you'd be forgiven for thinking "swagger" is a relatively new concept, but it can be traced all the way back to Elizabethan England. As with so many other famous words and phrases, the first writer to use it was William Shakespeare. The playwright first had the "shrewd and knavish sprite" Puck use it in this monologue in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here,

So near the cradle of the fairy queen?

While there is a tiny hint in this usage that swagger is closely related to braggadocio and pride, it wasn't until Henry IV, Part 2 that the meaning was really driven home by the bard. It's in that play that the London innkeeper Mistress Quickly gives this speech about one of the overly aggressive and forward men who frequent her tavern:

If he swagger, let him not come here: no, by my

faith; I must live among my neighbours; I'll no

swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the

very best: shut the door; there comes no swaggerers

here: I have not lived all this while, to have

swaggering now: shut the door, I pray you.

It's clear from this passage that swagger has two meanings - one that refers to drunken behavior, and another, more familiar one that denotes arrogance and (in the eyes of people like Mistress Quickly) an outsized sense of self-worth.

Sound familiar?

Jonathan Swift would also pick up this usage more than a century later, in 1726, with Gulliver's Travels, when he wrote that the Queen's Dwarf "would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me in the Queen's Antechamber ... and he seldom failed of a small Word or two upon my Littleness."

While the definition of the word would keep its judgmental connotations during the 1800s, in his 1865 dictionary, British etymologist Hensleigh Wedgwood defined the word in poetic terms, writing that it was "the idea of tremulous motion, swaying backwards and forwards ... commonly expressed by forms originally representing the sound made by the dashing of water."

By the 1870s, the word would take on the definition we know today - that is, as this 1872 dictionary puts it, "to boast or brag noisily." (Cultural critics have been declaring that "swagger" has been on the decline since at least 1892. A piece in the magazine Science that year called swagger "[t]he most obvious and disagreeable form of self-assertion, which consists of making other people conscious of their inferiority ... ")

But swagger, fittingly, was and is persistent. Definitions like the one in that 1892 article show how "swagger" was in many ways a natural fit for the hip-hop of the past two decades. According to Slate, the very first hip-hop artists to use "swagger" in a song were the group Brand Nubian in their 1990 song " Slow Down," where they note someone "used to walk with a swagger, now you simply stagger."

"Slow Down" would start a lyrical trend. As Ben Gabriel wrote in The New Inquiry three years ago:

Swagger is not new to hip-hop but has always been exterior to it. It recalls '70s rockers, '20s gangsters, pirates and Shakespearean vagabonds. The connotations are all, one might say, very white. But it is a very particular kind of whiteness - one which is very aware of itself and makes an explicit performance of its own economic or legal disenfranchisement.

Since then, the evolution of swagger has continued, and the word has been shortened to simply "swag" in recent years.

Apparently it's true, as Jay Z raps in " Otis," that the hip-hog mogul invented "swag."

But the award for the most gratuitous and random use of "swag" goes to rapper Souljah Boy in his song about Joseph Kony, leader of the guerrilla Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, "Stop Kony":

Stop Kony
What do you think we should do about it?
We should stop him
We should stop who?
Him.
It's obvious that Kony should be stoppped.
The problem is that 99% of the planet doesn't know who he is.
Swag.
If they knew, Kony would have been stopped long ago.
Swag.

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What Do Jay Z And Shakespeare Have In Common? Swagger

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"No one on the corner has swagga like us," sang rapper M.I.A. in her global hit "Paper Planes." The song was later sampled by T.I. and Jay Z in their hit song "Swagga Like Us." A few years before that, it was Jay-Z who declared "I guess I got my swagger back" on his 2001 album The Blueprint.

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What factors/influences contributed to words changing in meaning over the years?
What words can you identify in poetry and/or music that have changed in meaning over past centuries?
How does this information create a deeper understanding for your study of Shakespeare?

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Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode Spoken And Unspoken.
About Mark Forsyth's TEDTalk
Etymologist Mark Forsyth shares the surprising back story on the term "president."
About Mark Forsyth
Mark Forsyth is an author, blogger, journalist, proofreader and ghostwriter. On his blog, the Inky Fool, he dispells grammar myths. His book The Etymologicon takes "a circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language" by history of one word or phrase with each chapter.

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Mark Forsyth: How Does History Change The Meaning Of Words?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode Spoken And Unspoken. About Mark Forsyth's TEDTalk Etymologist Mark Forsyth shares the surprising back story on the term "president." About Mark Forsyth Mark Forsyth is an author, blogger, journalist, proofreader and ghostwriter. On his blog, the Inky Fool, he dispells grammar myths.