…do it the right way. Bless you, Neil:
Congress has renamed French Fries (for people who didn’t need any
explanation of who Bob Monkhouse was, that’s what the Americans call chips. They keep the word chips in reserve for crisps.),
er, anyway, they’ve renamed them Freedom Fries, to signify their
displeasure with their perfidious former allies. Coming soon in
America: sticking your tongue in someone’s mouth will be known as
freedom kissing, condoms will be freedom letters, while British Actor,
Coraline audio reader and the new Harry Potter, Dawn French, will, for
appearances in America, be forced to change her name to Dawn Freedom.
In Congress they will breakfast on Freedom toast, smear Freedom mustard
on their steaks and drink, well, Californian Wine I expect.
However, at least when shown on TNT, we can assume that the film The French Connection will be shown as, simply, The Connection,
and that any specific source for this connection’s location will have
been digitally erased.
…
I have very mixed feelings about Americans disliking the French. I’m
English, after all. We have a special relationship with the French: we
are in awe of their sophistication, their cuisine and their wines, we
think their women are beautiful, we like them as individuals, we badly
want to go and live in their country when we retire, while at the same
time we are deeply suspicious of them. It’s like having people living
next door to you who may be snappier dressers and better cooks, but
who, after all, borrowed the lawn mower sometime in the thirteenth
century and never gave it back. Anyway, the English dislike the French.
We’re really good at it. We’ve been doing it ever since we got up one
day and realised that the Norman Conquerors were now, like it or not,
Us, and weren’t conquering French people any more. We feel, frankly,
that if anyone’s going to dislike the French, it’s going to be us. On
the whole we manifest our dislike for them by drinking their wines,
buying up their cigarettes, and, despite the fact that all English
people can naturally roll their Rs and speak perfect French, declining
to do so, and when forced by circumstances to speak French the English
do it with an English accent on purpose.
These are tactics we’ve worked out over the course of hundreds of
years, and if carried on long enough, they will bring France to its
knees. I’m English. I know these things.
Changing the name french fries to freedom fries, on the other hand,
will just make them laugh at you.
Thank you so much. This blind american dislike of the french is so hypocritical. Shure they can go around eating there freedome toast and Freedome fries, even engaging in freedome kissing. But are they realy goingto stop drinking chempagn, and buying handbags at Lous Vitton? In my opinion they better make up there mind. Now the british they know what there doing.