Obnoxious Travelers recognize that comments spoken in English, however loudly, are incomprehensible to residents of countries other than America, England, and possibly Canada. If foreigners held a command of English, they obviously wouldn’t be wasting time with some other gibberish. Secure in this knowledge, Obnoxious Travelers feel completely at ease with expressing close-minded and misinformed criticisms of both foreign cultures and specific foreign individuals within earshot.

You know what’s truly scary? The fact that the birth control pill is only 99.9% effective. Wait, that means that one in a thousand times I should get pregnant anyway, right? That’s not really very heartening. If I entered a contest to win a car and the odds were one in a thousand, I would think, hey, I’ve got a pretty decent chance of winning this car. Except that car is an unwanted fetus!

I’ve had sewage on my mind since watching the Cohen Brothers True Grit. Early in the movie, Matty Ross’s search for Rooster Cogburn leads her to an outhouse. When she knocks on the door, we hear Jeff Bridges’ Rooster growl from inside: “The jakes is occupied.” She knocks again, and he says again, with even more gravel, “I said the jakes is occupied.”

“The jakes” is a term I remember from my Shakespeare. And here it is, in a Hollywood movie. It is just the beginning of the linguistic weirdness of True Grit. (The lingo they use. And where’d the contractions go?) For me, it is love at first shite.

In: Assonance
Out: Alliteration

In: Burgundy
Out: Bourgogne

In: Calico
Out: Coal tar

Dear Posh Guys:

I had no idea. I’m not dumb, or uneducated. I’m just American. We shy away from words like “master.” We eat a lot of desserts, but call only one of them pudding. We like tea, but mostly we drink coffee, no variety of which is named after our country, members of our peerage, or our former colonies.