Utterpants sent our researcher onto the streets of London to discover what the public thought of the President's latest wheeze.
"About bloody time," commented an anonymous ticket tout, as he directed two American tourists looking for Nelson's column to a big, black bloke flogging dodgy tom on Oxford Street. "I've never been able to understand a single word he says."
"We think Mr Bush meant American English as opposed to Spanish," we commented.
"Fucked if I can tell the bleedin' difference," opined the chirpy cockney chappie.

Two American tourists we spoke to were similarly underwhelmed by the President's linguistic credentials. "This is a brilliant statement from a man who routinely mispronounces nuclear," commented Consuela Lopez from Las Vegas in a charming Spanish accent.
"Fortunately for Bush," added her friend, Jody Silverstein, "The biggest word in our anthem is perilous—an adjective with which I'm sure he is only too familiar."

Of course, the assumption Bush is relying upon is that most Americans already know English. Donald Rumsfeld clearly doesn't, as the following, infamous example of his tenuous grasp on our shared language clearly shows: 'Reports that say something hasn't happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known unknowns; there're things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.'

English essayist, Adam Cooper once remarked: 'Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child. He knows it's important but he doesn't know what to do with it.' A truth which may explain why Americans shake down over $27 million worth of home grown porn every day with one hand, whilst tearing sex toys from the shaking thighs of Mississippi maidens with the other. Not that Americans should be able to speak English, it is, after all, a foreign language to those of us on this side of the Atlantic. No, the English language is for the English. What we speak is 100% pure, unadulterated American. If we spoke English, our bathrooms would be called loos, our cigarettes fags, our diapers nappies, and our hoods bonnets. We'd hang our clothes in a wardrobe, not a closet (that's for peeing in), pop our teeth into a glass on the bedside table, not the nightstand. More importantly, us girls would wear the trousers around our men folk, not pants. We’d take holidays and not vacations. We'd eat with metal knives and forks and not plastic sporks. We wouldn’t call someone up on the phone, we would ring them. If we sat on our fannies all day we'd be double jointed at best and in need of major clitoral surgery at worst. And if, God forbid, we ran out of rubbers, we could find another on the end of the nearest pencil.

It gets even worse in small town, Midwest America, where we designate the verb pop to mean a beverage and where tennis shoes are worn to play anything and everything but tennis. And should you ever visit England, for goodness sake don't ask for the washroom in a restaurant or they'll think you can't pay for your meal and send you to the kitchen to do the dishes. So before we proclaim that our national anthem ought to be sung only in English, it might be a good idea to specify what deformed dialect of English we actually speak? After all, we wouldn’t want anyone to misunderestimate us, would we?

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Story © 2006 Jennifer Gardner. Picture & Design © 2006 utterpants.co.uk / 050506