On the English

Posted
12 April 2001 at 00:04

The trouble with this site is that sometimes my sense of humour is just a little to dry for everyone to digest. Take yesterday, for example—most people spotted that I was making fun of the English, but a few American readers missed this and got all cross. To them I apologise—I’ll try and point out the humour in future.

So why make fun of the English? Because of their collective resistance of anything European. Take, for example, the painstaking conversion from imperial to metric measurements. It is still legal for pubs to sell beer in pints, and the day this is changed there will be considerable resistance. The English seem to think that there’s something inherently English about the pint—forgetting of course that the concept was originally brought in by the Flemish. So what is the relevance of this? While there is hostility towards anything European (metric measurements, single currencies, food imports and the like), but have seemingly no objection to the Americanisation of English culture. However, in spite of this, the English remain as xenophobic about everyone in equal proportions.

Comments are now closed. Gotta be quicker than that, sunshine! Maybe now would be a good time to subscribe to the RSS feed, and then the latest stuff will come and find you.

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