It's Tricky: Shawty Lo teaches us the alphabet

As we all know, it can be quite tricky to rock a rhyme right on time. Gunpowder Jones knows this better than most...do yinz realize how hard it can be to find the perfect rhyme for "lactate"? It's tough. It's like a full-time job, yo. But as with most full-time jobs, you gots to find a way.

Unless, of course, your name is Shawty Lo.

Shawty Lo, of D4L "fame" (everyone remembers Laffy Taffy, right?) may not be a household name, but he's got blingy jewelry and a nice car. The man makes legit money to find and locate these elusive rhymes. Yet, in a song called "So Fly" with Slim from 112 and Yung Joc, Mr. Lo hits us with this epic line:

"A E I, I OU
Sometimes Y, that can't be true"


Uh....what? Hear for yourself at about 15 seconds into this video, which has disabled embedding.

That is just awful. I don't even know where to start.

- That's not true, as I only appears once in the alphabet. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he knows this and is just saying it like this to make it fit the song.

- In this case...is he saying that these cannot possibly be the vowels in our alphabet? If so, Shawty Lo is DEAD WRONG. Yahoo answers may not be the best source, but they seem to agree with me on this one.

bevbum77 asks, "What are the vowels in the english language" and says:

not american, thanks xxxx

unahrhem, a five-star rated answerer answers with the following explanation that was chosen as "best answer":

The vowels in English language are ...a..e..i..o...u and sometimes...y... as it acts like it...
They are called vowels because their respective sounds which amount to 12 are produced with the free passage of air from the mouth to the larynx...at no time does anything within the mouth(the tongue) or the larynx or the lips touch...
The other sounds from the consonants all have something touching when being produced.

It may be a stretch to assume that Shawty Lo is bevbum77, but we cannot rule out this possibility. Hopefully, if so, his curiosities have been sufficiently debunked and he can back to rapping about things other than vowels. Or, he was asking due to the following possibility:

- Shawty Lo is confused as to how Y can act as both a vowel and a consonant. Could Shawty Lo be a quantum physicist? If so, he realizes immediately that if a letter is confirmed to be a vowel, it's consonantness CANNOT be determined to any level of certainty and vice versa. So how can we peg Y as both a vowel and a consonant? Dr. Lo seems to be unable to grasp the fact that Y just acts like a vowel, i.e. it is "frontin'". Dr. Lo simply brushes this possibility off as impossible and unable to be truth, which reflects a glaring stubbornness that has tragically befallen many areas of academia. We can hope that unahrhem was able to get through to him, but I don't count on it.

Either way, this blingy-ass motherfucker just said the vowels as a line in a major-label song that has it's own video and everything. It overshadows the catchiness of the song and Yung Joc bragging about his gmail account in the second verse.

I should just quit.