The Empress of America

george-thirdI found the satire below on Facebook. It is priceless and had me laughing! Bring back the stuffy throat-clearing noises, monocles, moustaches, colonial hats and those wonderful staff cars the Imperial Army had in the 1900’s in the streets of New Delhi! A new gentlemen’s club will be established in St James Square – the West American Club, furnished with the customary leather armchairs. Long live the Empress of America!

In accordance with Romantian norms, serious consideration must be given to cars and where pedestrians walk when in town. The raised part at the side of the road is called the pavement. Motor cars, with or without running boards, have a bonnet covering the engine and the compartment at the rear for luggage is the boot. The recolonisation of North America should include the reinstatement of pounds, shillings and pence together with Imperial weights and measures.

It can go on… Comments with suggestions are welcome.

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A MESSAGE FROM THE QUEEN

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.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

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1. 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’).

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2. 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.’

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

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4. 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.

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5. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. Although a permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

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6. 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.

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

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8. 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.

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9. 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.

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10. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie Macdowell attempt English dialect in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one’s ears removed with a cheese grater.

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11. 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).

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12. 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.

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13.. You must tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us mad.

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14. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).

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15. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 p.m. with proper cups, with saucers, and never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; plus strawberries (with cream) when in season.

God Save the Queen!

PS: Only share this with friends who have a good sense of humour (NOT humor)!

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12 Responses to The Empress of America

  1. David Llewellyn Dodds says:

    4. puts me in mind of Dame Edith Sitwell’s “Scotch Rhapsody”, where we meet

    the huntsman, playing on his old bagpipe,
    Boring to death the pheasant and the snipe —
    Boring the ptarmigan and grouse for fun —
    Boring them worse than a nine-bore gun.

  2. God save the Queen! She’d be a damn sight better as a ruler than the current yahoo who is infesting the White House. Or for that matter, of either the Blowhard or the First Felon, who seem at present to be the front runners for that office.

  3. Neil Hailstone says:

    I fully agree with Her Majesty’s declaration. I would respectfully ask her royal advisers to counsel her to add that the former colonists should abandon their Californian wine production. There are fine English wines which are available for export to the colonies.

    • No, I have tasted some very fine Californian wines from vines that are extinct in France. I have nothing against anyone being in business, as long as they are honest about their product. I would agree that I have tasted some nice wines from southern England. Perhaps we could make California and all that part of the continent entirely Spanish-speaking. We could let the imagination run riot. I don’t think we will bring back the cat o’ nine tails on Naval vessels! I thought of replacing the electric chair, gas chamber, lethal injection, etc. with good old British hanging – but I’m more for abolishing the death penalty altogether and setting up humane penal colonies where the inmates will work for their keep.

      • I entirely concur with the eminent Fr. Chadwick. And I would invite the casual reader to review the Judgment of Paris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)). The enology department of the University of California, Davis has done signal efforts in revolutionizing the whole process of wine making for the last century (and then some). I personally believe that there is plenty of good in California in particular, and the United States in general. But at this point, I believe that the only thing lacking there is good government. Thus: God Save The Queen!

    • Jim of Olym says:

      As California warms up and loses water, Washington and Oregon stand to gain, as well as the Okanagan in BC (still a loyal colony!)

    • David Llewellyn Dodds says:

      I once tasted some amazingly delicious wine from Michigan.

      And before I came to enjoy wines other than the fortified sorts, I was delighting in English mead.

  4. On the subject of “-ize” and “-ise” the writer is misinformed. He should follow his own advice and look it up in the OED.

    • I agree. I have often seen “-ize” in British English and find that it is encouraged in the translation industry (unless a client requests otherwise). I tend to use “ise” in my own writing. Also I don’t agree with the writer of this article that we should go metric, even though I have used the metric system for years in the European Continent. I always revert to Imperial in England and think in feet, inches, miles, yards, rods, poles, perches, furlongs, acres, stones, pounds and everything else. I sometimes remember that five new (1971) pence was the old shilling. I still remember how to do the old money sums! I was just beginning to get them right when it all changed – multiples of 12 carried over for the shillings and multiples of 20 carried over for the pounds. We had daily tests: less than 6 out of 10 earned a couple of whacks with the slipper! 🙂

      • CG says:

        I agree; and all professional people should tender their bills in guineas.

      • David Llewellyn Dodds says:

        When I first visited the UK (before decimalisation), the exchange rate was one American penny to one UK penny, so I was able to understand and thoroughly enjoy working with pounds/shillings/pence. (I love things divisible by three as well as two, like feet and shillings, degrees of a circle.)

  5. David Llewellyn Dodds says:

    Somewhat tangentially, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing Shaw’s The Applecart performed, but have still to catch up with Daphne du Maurier’s Rule Britannia.

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