A.Word.A.Day--John Bull
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John Bull (jon bul) noun
1. A personification of England or the English people.
2. A typical Englishman.
[After John Bull, a character in John Arbuthnot's satire, Law Is a Bottomless
Pit (1712).]
"Current historiography on the Mandate period is no longer dominated by a
demonization of the British, which was a recurrent theme during the first
decades of the state. Yet the disintegration of the old mythology is no
reason to create a new mythology, this one a fantasy of John Bull in
Palestine as a kind of disoriented Santa Claus, as in Segev's skewed
account."
Anita Shapira, Eyeless in Zion, The New Republic, Dec 11, 2000.
X-Bonus
When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away
the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer. -Corrie Ten
Boom, author and Holocaust survivor