"Do you have television in England?" an American lady once asked Mrs Brit.
We Brits (and Europeans and Australians and everybody else) like to have a laugh at the ignorance bred by America's media isolationism.
But then, when they can kick our arses into oblivion whenever they like, and given that we Brits are, essentially and sensibly, America's poodles, it is important to our psychologies that we can have a good laugh at things like this.
It's like Ahmadinejad 'choosing' to release the sailors.
It's easy for Americans to wonder what language they speak in England, especially if you have first-hand experience with a Brit whose accent you cannot penetrate.
ReplyDeleteI was walking in a mall in California once when I was in the Marines, and was wearing the green sweater that Marines call the "wooly pully", which was something we adopted off of the Royal Marines. A man who was asking passerbys whether they wanted to sign up for a store credit card remarked to me something that sounded like "bee-tengln". I asked him to repeat it at least four times and he finally sounded it out. "Have ye been to England?"
My father tells the story of a neighbor in the old neighborhood who hailed from Scotland. He spoke in the most unpenetratable guttural tongue imaginable, so it was only natural for my father to ask him "what language do you speak in Scotland?"
No, the question the American should be asking is: "If that's English, what language do I speak?"
ReplyDeleteThe clue's in the name. (Dozy yanks).
But seriously, asking "What language do you speak in England?" goes way beyond understandable American insularity. The question betrays a lack of awareness of her own American history and identity that is surely quite alarming.
True enough, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteBut it's still hard to understand how Americans can be so patriotic, yet so ignorant about what America was for in the first place.
A place to send convicts until you could get around to discovering Australia?
ReplyDeleteThe point of America was not being English any more. Surely they teach that at some point in your schools?
ReplyDeleteYou do understand the irony of that question, right?
ReplyDeleteSo, um, do you have television in England?
ReplyDeleteWe have telly. It's like your TV, but better by an order of magnitude.
ReplyDeleteSo long as you like to watch strangers digging through the attic looking for flowers to use to redecorate the place.
ReplyDeleteIs that what they're doing? So hard to tell, none of them seem to speak any English.
ReplyDeleteEngland isn't for anything. It just is.
ReplyDelete