That het’rogeneous thing

In a local paper this past week, an area businessman was called, “[a] true Englishman in the best sense.”

God knows what the reporter meant (“not a football hooligan” is probably insufficiently precise), but it made me chuckle, because I thought immediately of college boys in dress-up, singing Gilbert and Sullivan:

In spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
He remains an Englishman!

Then of Daniel Defoe’s, “The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr.” A quick trip via Google yielded the exact wonderfulness of this:

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:

In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,

Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.