In 1977 the BBC gave airtime to Tom Jackson, General Secretary of the British Union of Post Office Workers. Mr. Jackson was up in arms about a recent proposal that the British mail adopt the German method of addressing envelopes in which the house number is written after the name of the road, not before it (i.e. Downing Street 10, instead of 10 Downing Street). Jackson spoke at great length about the enormous burden this change would place upon postal employees, insisting that "Postal workers would be furious because it would turn upside-down the way we have learned to sort." His comments elicited an immediate reaction from the audience, many of whom phoned up to voice their support for Jackson's campaign. What the audience didn't realize was that there were no plans to change the way the British addressed their mail. Mr. Jackson's diatribe was an elaborate April Fool's Day joke.
Comments
Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.

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I think that my country, the U.S., is a land full of kids who have made up their own language because they do not understand any kind of English. Whether it is American or Standard kids in America are just not that smart. Kids are just getting dumber and fatter by the month here in America.
I also have to agree with Tom in England about the whole money issue. The American dollar is becoming less valuable as time goes on. Sooner or later America will need to be slapped in the face pretty hard. If not we are looking at a heck of a lot more debt in America. More than the billions of dollars we are already in.
And one more thing......what RabidEnglish said was pretty funny, "English doesn't borrow words from other languages. English follows other languages into dark allys, clubs them, and rifles through their pockets for loose vocabulary."
Posted by u.s. person  in  u.s.a.  on  Fri Mar 30, 2007  at  06:34 PM

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haha i think the prank was a good one, and got ppl worried....

I wish u guys ^^ would stop yelling at each other... who cares?

appreciate the joke and comment on that... dont bash other countries....

xxx
Posted by sarah Park  in  Australia  on  Fri Mar 30, 2007  at  08:57 PM

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whenwill the hatred stop its clear the iish are the better country out of all so ye giv ou bout that
Posted by john murphy  in  ireland  on  Sat Mar 31, 2007  at  04:54 AM

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hahaha, this is so lame.
Posted by ben  on  Sat Mar 31, 2007  at  10:38 AM

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Ok. First of all, who gives a flying fuck. Second, no, not all American kids are fat, retarded, and speak some form of ebonics. Not all Americans hate the British. But conversely, you can't honestly say that there isn't one pompous or mean person in the entirety of the UK. Frankly I don't care which side of the road I drive on, and I really don't care whose English is better or whose currency is stronger. I don't care how others play their basketball, I'm playing it my own damn way. Soccer should probably be called football, but it's still fun no matter what you call it. Thank you, OE, every language IS a bastardization, so get the fuck over it! Geez.

Sarah Park. Ppl? U? Please, God, kill me now.

Haha. It WAS a funny prank.
Posted by who cares  on  Sun Apr 01, 2007  at  10:25 AM

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who cares wrote: Frankly I don't care which side of the road I drive on

I sure hope I don't ever come across you on the M25.
Posted by Soruk  in  Basingstoke, UK  on  Sun Apr 01, 2007  at  06:02 PM

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In the book section of todays Denver Post there is a column called Hitting the Shelves. A short blurb under fiction notes aforthcoming book called Dreaming Baseball by James T Farrell. The bbok deals with the 1919 Black Sox scandel.It notes that Farrell is back with this book.Quite a trick since Farrell died in 1979. It is a clever hoax in that Farrell was an avid baseball fan who was 15 at the time of the scandel and lived in Chicago. It is rather obscure though and I wonder if other readers noticed this prank.
Posted by Frank Desmond  in  Aurora Colorado  on  Sun Apr 01, 2007  at  08:30 PM

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Heh the pounds, shillings, and pence system disappeared a long time ago. I think that is what they were referring to with the confusing monetary system. As to the issue, frankly I could understand why people would be outraged at the idea of such a proposed change, people get outraged over very stupid things.

One of the things Americans do which seems to be fairly unique to them is use MM/DD/YY for numbering, which makes documents incredibly annoying to read correctly in some cases since you don't know if it's DD/MM or MM/DD or even MM/YY. Outside of accounting I've never seen a point and in accounting my own ledgers are YYYY/MM/DD for easy of cataloging.

In this case the concept is the same find the street _then_ find the house, the number than street is just to do with the way we think. Same as phonebooks with surname than firstname, or firstname than surname (common in countries where the surname is actually derived from the same gendered parent).

Unfortunately if we did everything logically and the same way there would be little diversity, and nothing to hold our interest for long.

That quote is quite old now, I can't think who it really originally came from but it's true enough. English is a mongrel language, made up of many different languages rather than deriving from one single tongue, many of our words come from french or latin initally, though our grammar is more germanic in origin. But as someone also pointed out it did belong to the English first so them getting pissy over the further bastardization caused by American English is understandable.

As to the Brits you're still just whinging poms to those of us here in Australia, and Americans you're just yanks, whether you think it comes from yankee or not is upto you, myself I often think it comes from how full of it a lot of you act. If you find this offensive then I suggest you do some self evaluation and see what you can do to improve _your_ personal appearance to the people you interact with.
Posted by Ceri  in  Tamworth, Australia  on  Tue Apr 24, 2007  at  06:35 PM

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