President Threatens England with Economic Ruin over “Magastar”

The delicate peace between the United States and the United Kingdom shattered this morning when the President issued a final, gold-embossed warning to the scholars at Oxford. In a move that historians will surely call the most expensive spelling lesson in history, the President threatens England with total economic ruin if the word magastar is not granted a full-page entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Standing before his desk, the President explained that the British refusal to recognize the term—defined as “a level of fame so huge that light itself cannot escape an individual’s ego”—is a direct violation of the special relationship and a personal insult to his superior vocabulary. “We are tired of the British gatekeeping the alphabet,” the President declared, while waving a list of proposed tariffs on everything from lukewarm beer to those little hats the Royal Family wears to weddings.

“They told me it is not a real word,” the President remarked to a confused portrait of Abraham Lincoln. “They said it is a portmanteau. I do not even like portmanteaus. I prefer suitcases. They are much more durable.”

Yet, the British—a people who still insist on putting the letter ‘u’ in the word ‘color’ as if they are getting paid by the vowel—had issued a formal rejection.

The retaliation was swift and magnificent. By noon, a memo reached the British Prime Minister. It stated clearly that if magastar did not appear in the next printing of the OED, every shipment of British biscuits would be hit with a four thousand percent “Crumb Tax.” Any Englishman caught using the word lorry instead of truck while on American soil would be required to pay a tax of three hundred dollars U.S. As would all British actors who cannot do a convincing Queens accent.

“We have the best words,” the President shouted. “We have words that the British have not even dreamed of. They are still using words from the sixteen hundreds. It is sad. It is very lazy.”

The Oxford scholars panicked. They held an emergency meeting where they drank too much sherry and debated if magastar could be classified as a noun, a verb, or a lifestyle choice. Meanwhile, the President began drafting a second ultimatum regarding the word biglytude. He was ready to tax their umbrellas next.

The world waits with bated breath as the dictionary faces its greatest threat: a man with a highlighter and a dream.

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