ll of England is in a froth this week as rumors circulate about a deliciously dirty secret tucked deep into the cranny-holes of the House of Windsor. What exactly has a former manservant alleged about that most buck-toothed of Casanovas, Prince Charles of Wales? Newspapers all over Britain are bursting at the bylines to gush about this vile and heinous morsel, a tale promised to be so lurid and shocking as to rip the top of your head off and skullfuck to death your children who have still yet to be born.

But one obstacle remains to the commencement of this public orgy of disclosure: nobody can say what Charles is supposed to have done. Nobody; not the press, not your shopkeeper, not even a little talking cricket with an umbrella. Thanks to a lawsuit brought by yet another of Charles' deposed butlers and England's medieval libel laws, the mere mention of the Prince's alleged crime is enough to get a man strung up by his sweetmeats and fed English food intravenously until hell freezes over, or one of the Spice Girls wins the Nobel Peace Prize. In other words: pack your earmuffs, Gary Leon Ridgway.

This strange tale of anonymous denial and dueling ex-butlers has grown bizarre enough to make Charles's possible crimes almost incidental and likely disappointing in comparison, but regardless curiosity dangles an anvil over the cat's cranium with a vengeance this week.

"The Prince of Wales didn't do shit, and any shit it is alleged he may have done, was not done by him, regardless of whatever exactly that shit entails," Charles's private secretary Sir Michael Peat read from a prepared statement. "We won't say what it is he didn't do, but only seek to make it clear he didn't do anything. At all. No matter what you're thinking of, Prince Charles didn't do it. Furthermore, Charles penned this quote he wanted passed on to the general public: 'I ain't done shit, and you sons of bitches can kiss my inbred royal hiney until it shines. Love, Charles.'"

Managing editor for the Times, William Barclay, agreed to speak to the commune after consulting with his lawyers over how the letter of the law looked upon libelous "hints" and "warmer, colder" guidance. After being convinced that no one with a law degree would be caught dead reading the commune, Barclay agreed to evade our questions in an answerlike manner.

Did Charles… fondle a butler?

"No, absolutely not."

Did he have sex with a piece of antique furniture?

"Not that we're aware of."

Fluff a chicken?

"No."

Pork a stork?

"No."

Are we close at all on the sex thing, are we at least warm?

"We're not at liberty to divulge that information."

Nuts. Was that him in Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" video?

"I am certain I don't know."

Further inquiry clarified that the alleged offense did not involve dressing an elephant up like a cheerleader, cannibalizing the corpse of a dead war hero, eating an entire case of crisps in one sitting or drunkenly crashing his car into a whale's vagina. He also never choked on a pretzel, had his body painted to blend in with the London cityscape, or smoked Van Gogh's ear in a hash pipe. It is likely there were several more scenarios in which the heir to the throne did not take part, but this reporter was escorted out the door before he could fully formulate one involving Paddington the bear, marmalade, and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

fter coming under increased scrutiny in recent months for the inhumane treatment of the 736 million chickens they cannonball into American gullets every year, the fast food chain KFC made a sweeping public statement this week to address the concerns of consumers, animal rights activists, and the chickens themselves:

“Mmm… fried chicken!�

The statement, made in a low baritone and accompanied by a belly-rubbing gesture, has incensed PETA activists who have spent years working to change the chain’s practices. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals representatives have accused KFC of buying from suppliers who practice inhumane methods of raising and slaughtering chickens, including using drugs to breed chickens to grotesque proportions which cripple the bird, housing chickens in cages too small for the birds to stand up, resulting in the chickens actually growing around the cage wire, and combating the resulting panicked violent chicken behavior by cutting off the birds’ beaks. PETA also contends that these suppliers finish the screwjob by scalding the birds to death in feather removal tanks, just in case they didn’t get the message that life is a brutal and heartless experience.

Still, this latest statement represents a landmark for KFC, whose previous responses to activists had been even more insulting.

“KFC uses only the highest quality ingredients,� answered KFC’s US spokeswoman Bonnie Warschauer in 1996, rubbing her tummy when asked if it might not be unreasonable for KFC to raise the prices of its meals by a penny to pay for humane improvements, which might keep the general public from having to hear really gross chicken stories from liberal arts majors all the time.

In recent months, all-white-meat actress Pamela Anderson and noted extra-tasty-crispy comedian Russell Simmons have joined PETA in speaking out against the fast-food chain, a move that the group’s officials bemoan but have been powerless to block.

“If people knew how KFC treats chickens, they’d never eat another drumstick,� stated Anderson, no stranger to questionable breast-meat. Drumstick-eaters interviewed the street disagreed with Anderson, arguing that they were pretty sure KFC kills the shit out of their chickens before frying their corpses is scalding oil, but still wanted to know if she was hot in person.

KFC has also come under fire in recent weeks from health groups, who have taken offense at the chain’s commercials promoting KFC as a healthier alternative to other fast foods. The ads in question feature the animated “Colonel� character announcing, “Burgers give you ass cancer!� then rubbing his tummy and intoning sensually “Mmm… fried chicken!�

KFC, a unit of Louisville-based Yum Brands Inc., has been struggling with slumping sales in recent years, and has sought to address both its fiscal and public relations woes with the introduction of the new “extra-tasty-crazy� fried chicken variety, based on the popular assumption that chickens driven mad by slaughterhouse conditions might likely have an especially zesty flavor. The fast food chain was previously known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, but changed its name in 1991 to distance its products from the negative connotations of fried foods, chickens, and the state of Kentucky.

This latest obscene hand-gesture directed at animal rights groups by KFC is likely bad news for consumers, as PETA activists are already discussing the possibility of handing out buckets of mutilated chickens in front of KFC restaurants, unless they can think of something more disgustingly gut-wrenching on the way to the protest.

Anyone who receives a decent volume of correspondence from the American public will be convinced of one of two things. One is that the American public is retarded. The other is that the English language is retarded. A small subset may conclude that both are true, which is a mean but highly defensible position.

Unless you live on the campus of a major American university, or are rich enough to never have to shop at Wal-Mart, it is a dangerous proposition to believe the bulk of humanity inherently stupid, because the only way off that cruise ship to hell is a Winchester round in the mouth. It is a far better thing to point your stupid-blaming finger elsewhere, and in the case of mainstream America's inability to compose a coherent sentence or spell "comeuppance," the ripest target for pointing is indeed our very stupid language.

As anyone learning English for the first time can attest, it is clearly a language designed by a wretched and miserable people. Spelling holds no bearing on pronunciation, each letter makes several different sounds without rhyme or reason, and there are no accent markings whatsoever. The letters "X" and "C" are completely redundant. Words that are spelled entirely differently (won, one) are pronounced the same, yet have different meanings. Other words are spelled virtually the same but pronounced in wildly different ways (tough, though, thought). And we wonder why people moving to our country can never seem to master the language or make a decent Burrito Supreme.

Why is this, when people the world over who have vastly inferior weapons-making technology to ours still have languages that work fine? How did we manage to screw the pooch so completely in this most basic of tasks? The answer is the English language's roots as a bastard tongue that was never intended to be taken seriously in the first place.

English originated in 600 AD when some guys who were stoned were fucking around, making up words, and it soon spread as a way for little girls to alienate their parents while they were having sleepover parties. In short, it was the Pig Latin of its day. Over the years, more people in the lower classes began to use the language, since it was seen as a cool and antiestablishment way to communicate, more "street" than the stuffy proper languages of Europe. For hundreds of years there was no proper spelling of any word in English, writers spelled everything any damned way they pleased, but eventually the fad grew too big and the squares found out about it.

One giant square, Richard "Big Dork" Mulcaster of London, took it upon himself to devise a standardized spelling of English words. The socially maladjusted Mulcaster sought to prove his intellectual superiority by arranging the spelling of words not phonetically, but rather by extrapolating their historical origins. This was precisely the kind of thing that got him his ass kicked daily back in school, and for good reason.

Mulcaster, a back-of-the-closet homosexual, was terrified of homophones (words pronounced the same), and this greatly influenced his spelling scheme. Thanks to Mulcaster, virtually any combination of letters in English can be pronounced any way the writer likes, to avoid the possibility of spelling two different words the same way and being exposed as gay.

Between 1066 and 1400, England was ruled by the Normans, an insane clan of men who all had the same first name. They demanded that everyone speak Norman French, the same half-assed dialect American tourists speak when visiting Europe. By the time Henry IV reclaimed England for the English in 1399, the only people who remembered the English language at all were hilariously senile, and their vague remembrances became the foundation for modern English. But even then the language was not done being molested: In the 1400's the printing press was invented, and printing presses were run only by foreign immigrants who didn't know constant exposure to lead-based inks gives you cancer. Since printers were paid by the line, they frequently padded out words with extra letters to make their layouts more visually pleasing and profitable. In time, these skylarkings became standard English spellings of words since nobody cared and it was raining all the time anyhow.

This hideous amalgam of modern spelling had become standardized by 1700, with the first dictionary appearing in 1755. Between 1750 and 1850 both Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster attempted to make some sense of the English language, but in the end only succeeded in adding more words, including the noun "noat" for a midget-sized ark and the verb "franklin'" for being blown off a toilet in the middle of the night by a bolt of lightning.

Shorthand inventor Sir Isaac Pitman, drawn to spelling reform by the nonsensical spelling of his first name, developed the Phonotype alphabet in 1842, which succeeded in inspiring all manner of freaks to come out of the woodwork and develop their own alphabets. When the writer George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, one condition of his will was that a new English alphabet be developed in his name, which led to the creation of the Shaw-script, a hilarious new alphabet that looks exactly like a Word document accidentally converted into Wingdings.

Subsequent attempts at "fixing" the English alphabet have been dismal failures, since even simple spelling reform makes words look goofy, and anyone who's spent twenty years learning to spell English sort-of correctly isn't about to chuck all that just to make things easier on little kids and immigrants. And so, th status kwo of th Inglish layngwaj lumbrs forwrd unchaynjd, az it haz sins 1755.

º Last Column: Cursing the Fates
º more columns