AMERICAN

Americans were invented in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, who got the people speaking good, clear English.    The island belonged to Britain until 1776, the darkest year in our history, but we shan’t go into detail.   The result was that the Americans (henceforth Yanks) had independence, and from this point on, instead of receiving pronunciation training direct from the King, they were able to invent whatever odd-sounding words they pleased and get away with it!

The people’s personality is equally odd: “the USA, a country with a very varied ethnic mix, a strange blend of religious fanaticism, vast swathes of complex-ridden, self-conscious, deeply inhibited people, an innate aggressiveness and an over-developed, hyper-sensitive and misplaced sense of personal dignity”, said the Queen’s English Society, in tongues. “Any direct word, any uninvited physical contact (such as touching a person’s arm during a conversation) is considered an invasion of the person’s private space”.[1]   Americans are mostly inbred and lash out when one touches them on the crotch, which one mistook for their arm, a lashing-out which is entirely the result of too much freedom.   They also spit on the floor[2] and wipe their feet on the stair carpet,[3] probably because they’re so “deeply inhibited”.

Under their spell
These modern innovations include the 1906 Very Slight Spelling Reform, which I just looked up on Wækipædiæ and am now p***ed (off) about!   President Theodore Roosevelt “ratified” this, and some “unnecessary” letters were removed from words like color and maneuver.

Of course, spelling reforms are a ridiculous way of disfiguring a language and have only taken place in Russian, Chinese, Turkish, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Japanese, Indonesian, Viet-Nâmese, Korean, Greek, French, American and (unofficially) British English in the 16th and 17th centuries.  The US reform still angers the QES, who wrote “to what extent ‘neighbor’ is simpler than ‘neighbour’ (and why not go all the way and use ‘naybor’?) is beyond [my] comprehension.”[3] Well, let’s see. Neighbour contains 2 spelling difficulties: the gh and the irregular -our ending.  The reformers made one of these easier. I dread to think how the QES would’ve reacted to naybor; probably with a heart attack. They should really be targeting those 17th-century British spelling changes: we lost good old spellings like logique, warre, and toune (town) forever. But I fail to see how war is simpler than warre (why not go completely potty and write wor??!).

Taken too far, reform could lead to linguistic Anarchy where all words are spelled regularly according to pronunciation!  But this is impossible: people in different countries never agree with each other; this is why there’s wor.  So we hereby announce our Warre Against Reform & American Independence, and are glad to have the support of Bernard Lamb and the QES.  We’re also against all language change and progress, but that should be obvious by now.

Super Power
“But”, I hear you whinge, “If it wasn’t due to those disgusting Americans, how did English attain such worldwide dominance?”   Well, get stuffed.  British English is the dominant language in foreign lands, not American, because I understand non-Americans well but Americans are incomprehensible so that proves that then! Ho, ho ho.  But the Americans’ attitude towards their subhuman language will most certainly allow the Chinese to overtake our (British) superpower status and so we must all write web pages like this that sound a bit like xenophobia but are actually serious linguistic research.

We leave you with a few scientific, non-arbitrary examples of Bad American:

– their ridiculous mispronunciation of frustrated, controversy, translate, et cetera: the stress can only be on the second syllable, not the first!
– and dislocate, details, baton: the stress can only be on the first syllable, not the second!
– and, finally, “I could care less”, which means “I couldn’t care less”... whywhwyw why would someone say that?  Unless it’s short for “I could care less... if I tried very hard”, which is extremely sarcastic and offends our British notions of irony, which the Americans aren’t allowed to have!   Here they have out-sarcastificated us!   Just another reason why they could be trusted less.

(By the way, if any Americans want to join our campaign against their own language, they can here do so.)

Next: Australian >
Grow back to Main Menu

See also
– Pulp Fiction
– Jay Leno
– Bill O’Reilly
– Annoying Questioning Intonation?
– How to overlook oversights
– William Strunk
– Don McLean
– Like and unlike
– Womyn
– Grow
– Check it out
– Solutions
– Religious fanaticism
– The Queen’s English Society
– Spelling reform
– Silly foreigners
– Spanish
We still maintain that American English ought to be destroyed, even though we would have nothing to talk about without it.

Further reading:
Bill Bryson, Mad in America