It struck me as entirely possible that on 16th 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.
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