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Comment by drcomputer | Hacker News Reader

Shakespeare also invented words when the ones he could not express the concepts he wanted to convey. Those words also had to be accepted and understood by those who read his literature. I think when people feel stuck between paradigms, there's something very special about that.

> How hearing it in the original pronunciation brought out the puns and rhymes.

These happen accidentally sometimes.

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Lots of the puns also come out when spoken with a Southern accent. Add a drawl and "hour" sounds a lot like "whore".

  And then he drew a dial from his poke,
  And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
  Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock:
  Thus we may see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags:
  'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
  And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
  And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
  And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
  And thereby hangs a tale.'

Edit: added Act II, Scene VII from As You Like It for context.

That's not really surprising. The American southern accent is, afaik, widely believed to be much closer to the accent spoken by the British who first colonized the US. This accent would have been something on the cusp of early modern english (which Shakespeare's work is an example of) turning into modern english.

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