「英文標準問題精講」の最後の問題の冒頭を引用してみます。 “It is, and has been for a long time, the most prized of our national possessions: a sense of humour. How much and how often we congratulate ourselves upon it: what a moral support it has been to us throughout two wars, how it made us less worried by the coming of rationing and the dropping of bombs, how since the war it has enabled us to look with tolerance on the diminishing of the Empire. A modern educated Briton will be ready to smile at the description of him as a communist or a reactionary, and he is likely to remain self-satisfied under the suggestion that the nation he belongs to is a second-class power; but it will be unwise to suggest to him that he lacks a sense of humour,” (SIR ERNEST BARKER, The Charter of England)