The 2008 election has been called off

Subject: John Cleese's Letter to America

To the citizens of the United States of America:
In light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, will resume monarchical
duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories (except
Kansas, which she does not fancy), as from Monday next.

Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, 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:

1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Then look up "aluminium," and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'colour', 'favour' 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."

3. You will learn that the suffix 'burgh' is pronounced 'burra'; you may elect to respell Pittsburgh as 'Pittsberg' if you find you simply can't cope with correct pronunciation.

4. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to
acceptable levels (look up "vocabulary" ). Using the same twenty-seven
words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is unacceptable and inefficient form of communication.

5. There is no such thing as "US English." We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of "-ize."

6. You will relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen",but only after fully carrying out Task #1 (see above).

7. July 4 will no longer be celebrated as a holiday. November 19 will be a new national holiday, but to be celebrated only in England. It will be called "Come-Uppance Day."

8. 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 adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

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

10. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

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

12. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling "gasoline" ) - roughly $6/US gallon. Get used to it.

13. 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 mayonnaise but with vinegar.

14. Waiters and waitresses will be trained to be more aggressive with

customers.

15. 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." American brands will be referred to as "Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine," so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.

16. 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
dialogue in "Four Weddings and a Funeral" was an experience akin to
having one's ears removed with a cheese grater.

17. 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).

18. 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 that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable.
19. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.

20. 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.

Thank you for your co-operation.

John Cleese

Very clever

Not this old chestnut.

Alas, it's mostly bulls***, and the retort makes us Brits look like idiots. I'd like to find the person that wrote it and give him a history lesson so he can stop speaking for us all and making look like idjits.

It is old and funny but stumblin is right, it makes us look stoopid

Heh, that was kinda funny.

The only thing I get from it is that the author is an extremely arrogant jackass.

I especially like #10, as I know more Brits on TFS that own Fords than I do Americans.

I thought it was funny, everyone has a little fun sometimes.

Number 1 makes me laugh. The pronunciation of Aluminium is a common complaint from Brits against the Americans. Until you point out that it was originally called Aluminum, and it's was us (the Brits) who renamed it, not the yanks.

The removal of U's and various silent letters from the language was an attempt by Webster to make the language more phonetic, and hence significantly easier to learn.

There is such a thing as US English. You just spent several paragraphs pointing out the differences between UK English and US English. Lot's of things about it actually make a lot more sense. But not schedule. Schedule is said with a soft "ch" and I just can't condone saying "skedule".

That -burgh is prounced burra is silliness. The only reason I can imagine is that enough people couldn't spell it's precursor borough, and who would be surprised? The US isn't entirely innocent of this sort of crap though, and Arkansas needs to closely examine the last letter of it's name.

In answer to number 4, presumably the author hasn't visited any secondary schools recently and listened to how our youth talk.

Talk of how ridiculously outmoded and outdated a monarchy is as a system of governance, up to and including having a civilian OAP as CiC of the armed forces would be redundant. So I'll go no further.

Number 16 I will agree with. Just face it, US actors have a long pedigree of just not being able to do a decent English accent. Virtually everyone I knew was amazed when I pointed out that House (Hugh Laurie) was English, not American.

American Football (Football) and Soccer (Football) are two different games. Get the f*** over it already. Ditto with Rugby.

Anyway, more to follow when I can be bothered.

You own Americans????????????????// I thot slavery was abolished in the States


Actually Cleese is an arragont a** but a very funny arrogant ass.

Your superior British language skills should be able to do a better job parsing that sentence.




Perhaps.

He didn\'t have anything to do with the "letter" though.

Why is it that your link simply quotes imb4u2's post?

The answer to that question would be closely related to my inability to copy and paste properly.

I fixed the previous post, but here is the correct link again:

https://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/revocation.asp

First--- the addition of the letter U in words like coloUr or ManoUr or honoUr has to be one of the stupidest traits of the Brits. It's almost as stupid as the spelling of "enough" or "though". If "enough" is prounounced "enuf" why is "though" pronounced the "tho" and not "thuf" As far as the Pittsborough thing goes it actually should be pronounced that way because there is no "berg" in the name. I used to live in Roxboro and some stupid people wanted to change it to Roxbouough. It was defeated mainly because it was in the province of Quebec and they will likely change it to Fleur De Lis or Flambourough or some other meaningless French name

There was a thing out about phonetic English that made a lot of sense. Ther wuz a thing out about fonetik English that maid a lot uv sense.
It could have been wrtten: Their was a thing aot abaot Phonetique hinglish that maid a lot uv cents.
The english language is stupid. Everyone should speak Spanish or German where the words are spelled like they sound.

Be my guest. Just don't blame me when you can't pronounce entschuldigung next time you want to stop someone in the street. Oh, and when you mix up your nominaative and accusative and say "the man bites the dog" instead of "the dog bites the man", and masculine feminine and neuter. Or if you forget to pronounce the umlaut and end up saying "I'm going out naked" instead of "I'm going out tonight".

Every language has it's problems and complexities. English was actually more advanced than most other languages when the printing press was invented. By that time we had removed many complexities, like word gender. French and German, to name just two, had not, and they were pretty much frozen in place by mass printing, since it becomes more difficult for a language to evolve.

The US was in a unique and enviable position to redefine a modern, evolved language, and they did so, with greater or lesser success.

I guess what I'm saying is lay the hell off other countries.

I have often wondered why they call it the world series?? But it will never be stopped cause its the most popular sport and its not just America that follows it.