How To Be An Alien

1. When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles — but never England.

2. Please note my extensive knowledge of the American language.

3. While this book was at the printers a correspondence in The Times showed that the English have almost sixty synonyms for “street.” If you add these to the street names which stand alone (Piccadilly, Strand, etc.) and the accepted and frequently used double names (“Garden Terrace,” “Church Street,” “Park Road,” etc.) the number of street names reaches or exceeds a hundred. It has been suggested by one correspondent that this clearly proves what wonderful imagination the English have. I believe it proves the contrary. A West End street in London is not called “Haymarket” because the playful fancy of Londoners populates the district with romantically clad mediaeval food dealers but simply because they have not noticed as yet that the hay trade has considerably declined between Piccadilly and Pall Mall in the last three hundred years.