EAT IT, BRITAIN

A while ago, a friend sent me a joke that her British friends had been circulating around Facebook entitled “A Message from the Queen.”  It starts like this:

To the citizens of the United States of America from Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. (You should look up ‘revocation’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except North Dakota, which she does not fancy). Your new Prime Minister, David Cameron, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

It was followed by a bunch of “new rules” for us to follow, now that we’re under British rule. Now, I may not be proud of everything my country does, but I WILL BE GODDAMNED IF SOME SNOT-NOSED BASTARDS FROM A TINY, GREY, DREARY, RAIN-SOAKED ISLAND IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC ARE GOING TO TELL US HOW TO DO IT BETTER.  Consumed with righteous patriotic anger, I wrote this post.

1. Spelling

The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘colour,’ ‘favour,’ ‘labour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘-ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘-ise.’ Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up ‘vocabulary’).

This will be the first of many instances of those limey bastards changing something for no reason and then claiming that their new version is the correct version and insisting that other people use it.  It’s arrogance cut with just a smidge of ignorance.  As it turns out,

Most words of this kind come from Latin non-agent nouns having nominative -or. These words were first borrowed into English from early Old French and the ending was spelled -or or -ur. After the Norman conquest of England (1066), the ending became -our in Anglo-French to try to represent the Old French pronunciation.

Hear that, ENGLAND?  You fucked it up.  You took words from Latin, the root of most modern language, and stuffed another letter in the back to appease the fucking French.  And why did you have to add the new ending to appease the fucking French?  Because they conquered your puny island a thousand years ago.  It’s not totally your fault — you were probably weak from Vitamin D deficiency, having not yet been made aware that the sky has a color other than gray — but nonetheless, you were overrun by the French.  And then, in the most British move ever, you claimed your conqueror as English.  William the Conqueror is not an Englishman, he’s a fucking Viking.  And he stompled your ancestors into the mud, thus forcing you to add a letter to the ends of words that should never have had it in the first place.  We’re just fixing your mistake.  You’re welcome.

 

2. Vocabulary

Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as ”like’ and ‘you know’ is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as U.S. English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated letter ‘u” and the elimination of ‘-ize.’

Just because Shakespeare was English, you think you’re all masters of the language?  That’s not how it works.  And if you think you get to judge our vocabularies by what I can only imagine is People magazine, then we get to judge yours by Stacey Solomon.

That should rest my case, but I’m not finished with you.  I decided, just for kicks, to see which nation had won the most Nobel Prizes for literature, and OH WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT, America wins again.  We have twelve, you have ten.  And to add insult to injury, only six of yours were born in the UK.  Eight of ours are homegrown.  Maybe you should work on getting a better handle on that language you’re so goddamn proud of.

3. July 4th

July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

Why, because it reminds you of the time the greatest military force in the world was brought to its knees by a few thousand farmers with rifles?  Or is it that the best celebrations you can muster involve an old woman sitting next to a river waving at boats in the rain?  Don’t let your inadequacies taint your judgement here, it’s ok that we do fun better than you.

 

4. Litigiousness

You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you’re not quite ready to be independent. Guns should only be used for shooting grouse. If you can’t sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist, then you’re not ready to shoot grouse.

Fair point.  Although, grouse?  I know you’re not allowed to hunt foxes any more, but if you’re going to hunt, can’t you do better than the stupidest-looking bird in the world?

You used to have elk, but they died out FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO because Britain is such a horrible dingy place that they simply lost the will to live.  They weren’t hunted to extinction or anything.  They just died.  Would you like to see what we do with grouse here?

That’s right, BRITAIN.  We have millions of guns and will use them at the slightest provocation, like if McDonald’s gets our order wrong, but grouse are not even worth shooting at.

5. Driving

All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left side with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

Sure, there is a case to be made for using metric, but the British sure as hell aren’t going to make it.  The Brits use miles per hour, according to every episode of Top Gear ever, they measure their beer in pints, and the currency is named after pounds.  The units are called “imperial” units because they were invented by the British Empire, so you can shut the fuck up about the metric system.  And there is no objective case for driving on one side of the road versus the other, except to point out that the only part of the world that drives on the left is what remains of the British Empire, who stole the idea (shockingly) from the Romans.

You don’t have an empire any more.  It’s just stubbornness.  Stop it.

6. Gasoline

The former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) of roughly $10/US gallon. Get used to it.

We’ve been calling it “gasoline” since 1864, you’ve been calling it “petrol” since 1892.  A word which, again, you stole from the French.  For people who complain about the use of their language, you don’t seem to know much about it.  Also, why would you want gas prices to rise?  Wouldn’t you want to take advantage of cheap American gas, now that you’ve re-appropriated us as a country?  I think it’s jealousy.  We get most of our oil domestically.  The next biggest source is Canada, which used to be British, and the next is Mexico, which is also right next to us.  That is why our gas is cheap.  You, on the other hand, have no oil.  Don’t be petty.

7. Chips

You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

I’m genuinely starting to become bored with how wrong you are about all of these things.  Listen, you weak-kneed, snaggle-toothed morons: do not even fucking start with me on what they’re “properly” called.  The potato chip was invented in 1853 in Saratoga, New York.  In the United States.  They were referred to as “Saratoga Chips” for nearly a hundred years after that. You didn’t get them on your little backwater island until 1920, whereupon a man named Frank Smith called them “crisps” and you’ve spent the better part of a century insisting that you thought of them first.  You’re wrong.  They’re ours, and we’re letting you have them because we feel sorry for you for not having a single other flavorful thing to eat.  And what you call chips have in fact been referred to as “French fries” since World War I and were either invented by the Belgians or the French.

 

8. Beer

The cold, tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable, as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of the British Commonwealth – see what it did for them. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat’s Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.

Don’t.

You.

Fucking.

Dare.

All English beer is the same.  It is bland, it is pale, it is weak, and it has a vague taste of being brewed in a country where anything left out for too long gets mold on it.  Guinness is the only dark beer that comes from your corner of the world that anyone’s ever heard of, and it’s so bad that we only drink it with Bailey’s in it.  I could go into any liquor store in Colorado, ask them for the best thing in the store with the word “stout” on it, and not a single person would hand me a Guinness.  I also poked around for some sort of world beer awards, so I could compare wins from each nationality.  What I found is called the World Beer Awards, fittingly enough, and has roughly a hundred categories each year from across the globe.  And it’s based out of England, so they should get some kind of home field advantage, right?  In 2013, the UK took home five awards.  The US got twelve.  South Africa had none.

Which brings me to this preposterous idea that South Africa, of all places, is the greatest sporting nation on Earth.  As it is impossible to compare directly by most metrics, since we have football and baseball and basketball and hockey and they have cricket and soccer and rugby and doubtless other crude and ridiculous sports.  So I judged the respective nations by all-time Olympic medals.  Would you like to see the results?

• South Africa: 76
• United Kingdom: 806
• United States: 2,681

It is not even close.  The US has three times as many medals as the other two put together.  Michael Phelps alone has a third as many medals as the entire nation of South Africa has accrued in 27 games.  By any meaningful objective metric, the United States is the best breeding ground for world-class athletes on the planet.

Must be the beer.

9. Football

You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies).

Fuck you.  The Super Bowl is the most popular sporting event in history.  Soccer, on the other hand, is the second least interesting sport in the world, and you don’t even care about it as much as we care about football.  The viewership of the World Cup in England is consistently lower than that of the Super Bowl in the US, even when England is in it.  You don’t even cheer as loudly for your teams.  The top three loudest stadium records in the world were all football, and all this year.  Your largest stadium would rank 14th in the US.  Your most-attended team would rank 6th this year among NFL teams, and your second most-attended would be 28th.  You are, frankly, pathetic.

10. Baseball

Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of their deliveries.

I’m beginning to think that you have a weird fetish for the South Africans.  They’ve never won the ICC Cricket World Cup, so I’m not sure why you keep using them as an example.  And yes, the the World Series is a bit of a weird name for the series, but baseball is huge in Japan, Korea, and most of South America, so this allegation that the game isn’t played outside our borders is just ludicrous.

11.  Aluminum

This one isn’t on the list, but it’s been bugging me ever since I first heard the word “aluminium.”  In 1812, Sir Humphry Davy discovered aluminum and named it with that spelling.  You refer to it as the American spelling, despite the fact that it was an Englishman who discovered and named the element in the first place.  That same year, the British Quarterly Review decided arbitrarily to call it “aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound.”

What a bunch of fucking pricks.  To wait less than a year after the discovery of a new fucking element and then say “we don’t like the sound of that so we’re going to call it something else,” and then to relentlessly mock THE ONLY ENGLISH-SPEAKING NATION IN THE WORLD WITH THE RESPECT TO USE THE NAME ITS DISCOVERER GAVE IT,  is just the cherry on the cake of English arrogance.

So to sum up: you don’t know where your words come from, you’re worse at your own language than we are, you’re jealous of our fireworks, your animals are stupid, you apparently are unable to read your own road signs, you’re stubbornly sticking to a road system that most of the world doesn’t use, you have no gasoline and are spiteful towards us because we do, you don’t know a goddamn thing about what meager shreds of culinary culture you possess, your beer-making skills are eclipsed by ours, you’re shitty at sports, you’re terrible sports fans, and you can’t even give your most influential scientists the respect they deserve because of some ridiculous idea about what elements should sound like.  Your royal overlords are a frail old woman and a tiny baby and half the shit you take credit for, you stole from the fucking French.

And where we have the mighty and majestic bald eagle, one of the most fearsome airborne carnivores in the world, your national bird is this:

A bird best known for its ability to get worms out of the ground, but only when it’s raining, which it always is.

Use small words when you talk shit to us.  You’ll be eating them later.