THE BOOK OF BLOODY
BRITS
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE BOOK OF THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
The Brits tolerate provincial writers
Chapter 45
And even though there was absolutely no chance that they could ever live up to Shakespeare,
2The Brits also tolerated attempts at literature by writers from their most benighted provinces,
3gSuch as Ireland, Scotland, and America,
4Even though most of the writers from these places didn’t really like English,
5And kept trying to turn it into something else,
6Like hRobert Burns, a Scot who owned a istinking japostrophe factory in Glasgow and thought English would be better if it had several apostrophes in each word,
7kAnd George Bernard Shaw, an Irishman who thought English would be better if the right spellings for words could be decided by five hundred drunken Irishmen in a pub,
8And lJames Joyce, an Irishman who thought he’d like English better if he turned it into a language that nobody could understand,
9mUnless their name was James Joyce,
10And nWilliam Butler Yeats, an Irishman who thought English would be better if it kind of seemed to make sense,
11oUntil you read it more carefully,
12And pT.S. Eliot, an American who thought that English would be better if it contained so many qdepressing foreign language references that no American would ever be able to figure them out,
13Unless that American had the exquisite taste to move to Britain,
14And spend the rest of his life looking up neat foreign language references in rdusty Brit libraries,
15Under the shadow of Shakespeare.
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