In a local paper this past week, an area businessman was called, “[a] true Englishman in the best sense.”
God knows what the reporter meant (“not a football hooligan” is probably insufficiently precise), but it made me chuckle, because I thought immediately of college boys in dress-up, singing Gilbert and Sullivan:
In spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
He remains an Englishman!
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
He remains an Englishman!
Then of Daniel Defoe’s, “The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr.” A quick trip via Google yielded the exact wonderfulness of this:
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
It was Flanders and Swann who wrote:
The English the English the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest
It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad
It's just that they're foreign that makes them so mad
The English are all that a nation should be
And the pride of the English are Chipper and me
Can't say fairer than that, then!