An American Story.

I just typed the word ‘vigour’ in an email, and straightway I was reprimanded by Microsoft for spelling it wrong. ‘There’s no ‘u’ in vigor,’ said the American corporate giant. I chose to disagree, but arguing with an American corporate giant is a bit like filling lots of buckets with sea water in Cornwall in the misguided belief that you’re taking some off the damn Yankees. Logic is not promoted by such an act, as outrage is wasted on American corporate giants. It did promote an interesting speculation, however.

It struck me as entirely possible that on 16^th December 1773, a bunch of ragged and utterly disreputable colonials roamed the town of Boston, Mass, confiscating the letter ‘u’ wherever it might be found – on shop signs, letraset sheets, children’s language-learning blocks, and so on – throwing them all into an equally ragged and disreputable sack, adding for ballast the body of a drunken British sailor they’d found lying in an alleyway having choked on his own vomit, and throwing the whole cargo into Boston harbour crying “there ain't no ‘u’ in harbor” as they did so. Up went the cry from the masses: “There ain’t no ‘u’s here. This is Americuh and we don’t damn well like ’em.”

When they were caught in the act by the authorities, and being advised that they’d incorrectly spelt America with a ‘u’, they became highly embarrassed and claimed that what they’d actually thrown into the harbo(u)r was a load of tea because they objected to the fiscal principle of taxation being applied to honest, hard working colonials. And so a legend was born, and wise men wrote of a coming Messiah called Sarah Palin, and France decided to give them a spare statue that they wanted to get rid of because they’d got no space left in Paris, and all was well in the Land of the Free.