As a starting point for Extreme Makeover: Linguistic Edition, Webster sought to redefine the spellings of words according to how they sounded when said aloud. Words like "theatre" and "centre" became "theater" and "center," whilst superfluous letters were excised from words like "plough" ("plow"), "axe" ("ax"), and "catalogue" ("catalog"). The letter "u," meanwhile, was drop-kicked into an open grave and buried alive. It's also really hard not to take this thing personally when you learn that Webster refused to redefine the spelling of "glamour" because it was a Scottish word, not an English one, the bloody ingrate.

Webster's approach did have some drawbacks -- namely, that some words look fucking ridiculous when spelled as they're spoken. The word "tongue" nearly became "tung," and it was only the collective insistence of, like, everyone that "soup" and "leopard" now aren't spelled "soop" and "leperd." On the plus side, that would have been more characters on Twitter, and besides that, who the hell spells anything correctly these days anyway?

As for the sailors, the charge that we kept stealing them might have held a little more weight if an estimated half of those sailors weren't actually deserters from the Royal Navy (something that American politicians at the time quietly conceded). As far as we were concerned, we were just taking our men back ... to hang them, sure, but it's the principle that counts, right?

Meanwhile, the British had also made their presence known in the Northwest by supporting Native American resistance groups opposed to westward expansion, particularly Tecumseh's Confederacy. Although some Native groups sided with the U.S. in the following conflict, the vast majority sided with the British, in the hope that a British victory would bring an end to expansion and, as was touted at the time, bring about the creation of an Indian state covering Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.

Lastly, Canada. Thomas Jefferson fucking hated the fact that there was still a British presence in North America. In his mind, however, that was nothing that a quick invasion couldn't solve. In a letter that he sent prior to the outbreak of war, Jefferson described Canadapocalypse '12 as representing nothing more than an idle stroll north -- a smattering of bravado made all the more hilarious by the fact that the drunken ragtag militia he originally sent to subjugate an entire country got their asses handed to them politely at the border.

wikipedia.org

In hindsight, it's probably fairer to say that this was nothing more than a big misunderstanding. Yeah, you guys were being dicks, sure. But -- and historians agree with this conclusion -- it didn't help that our long and tedious war against Napoleon had hardened us into one of those "You're either with us or you're against us" countries (you know the type). If we'd all just sat down and talked, this whole thing could have been avoided. Hell, most of the issues that precipitated it came to a natural conclusion anyway. And it's telling that the only lasting consequences were peace between our two nations and Canada coming out of it with some badass war stories and a gnarly couple of scars.

When Britain eventually collapses (current estimated date: March 2019) and every single acre of land is sold to the Chinese, I like to think that we'll be treated to a pre-season-finale-esque montage of our best and worst moments. I don't know what the former will be (although I have some ideas), but I'm expecting a long discussion about the clusterfuck known as "appeasement" -- wherein Neville Chamberlain rolled over and gave into every single prewar demand Hitler made, in the vain hope of avoiding war at any cost.

However, we're looking at the situation with hindsight, when you have to look at it from the perspective of a country that a) only just managed to persuade people to stop having terror nightmares about the trenches and b) thought Hitler was sane.

wikipedia.org

One particularly controversial method used to appease the Fuhrer was straight-up giving him part of another country ... without asking. When the Sudetenland -- a border region of Czechoslovakia -- demanded to be unified with Nazi Germany on account of its heavily German population, Hitler saw an opportunity to acquire territory, and demanded the region on pain of war. Britain and France responded by handing over the Sudetenland without asking the Czechs. Still, war was averted and Chamberlain arrived home triumphantly clutching a piece of a paper which said that everything was hunky-dory.

It wasn't.

There were several other factors in play. For instance, our armed forces weren't prepared to fight another war, and Chamberlain was more focused on getting Hitler's support in anticipation of a dust-up with Russia. But chiefly, the fatal flaw of appeasement is that it only works if your opponent is sane and not, say, a heavily armed genocidal baby.

Of all the bullshit laws and regulations that the British tried to push onto the American colonies in the years preceding their revolution, the idea of taxation without representation is the most baffling of all. Charging people to live in a democracy and simultaneously denying them a right to participate? It was pretty much guaranteed to end in failure.

wikipedia.org

One fact that often gets overlooked in discussions about how indifferent and uncaring the British were about the plight of the colonists, however, is that taxation without representation wasn't just a colonial thing -- it was also how Parliament worked. Unlike today, when anyone with the requisite number of personality disorders can become a politician, the British Parliament of ye olden days was only open to rich landowners and members of the landed gentry. As the money men, they were considered the real power behind the country, and so were afforded the right to govern it. This is a leadership style known as "oligarchy."

wikipedia.org

As for the people living in the towns and cities, meanwhile, they got little-to-no representation in the halls of power. Like the colonists, they were taxed and told to GTBHA (Get The Bloody Hell Away) when the time came to running things. In our eyes, you were only rehashing complaints about an unrepresentative system that we'd already expressed and, after being ignored, come to terms with. But in a twist that I'm taking great pains not to compare to Batman v. Superman, it turned out that the rich guy was fucking us both in the same way. We just didn't know it.

So I hope this sets some things straight, because I think it's high time we put these things behind us and heal these wounds so that we can finally become the soul-bonded allies we were always meant to be.

Edit: I just found out that Americans already think we're allies. Please ignore the previous sentence.

Check out Adam's new Facebook page! Or if you're, like, ancient, you can follow him on Twitter.

For more check out Super White & Kinda Racist: 5 Realities Of Australia and The 4 Strangest Things Nobody Tells You About Life in China.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out 3 Foreign Countries That Just Don't Give a F#@% and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. Cracked: Bringing the world together one dick joke at a time.

2016 is almost over. Yes, this endless, rotten shit hurricane of a year -- which took away Bowie, Prince, and Florence Henderson, and gave us Trump, Harambe, and the Zika virus -- is finally drawing to a close. So to give this bitch a proper viking funeral, Jack O'Brien and the crew are going to send out 2016 with Cracked's year in review. They'll rectify what every other year-in-review gets wrong by giving some much-needed airtime to the positive stories from 2016 and shedding light on the year's most important stories that got overlooked.

Get your tickets for this LIVE podcast here!