Public Health: The Anglosphere's Global Disease

You gotta laugh at the obsessive puritan mentality sometimes.

At @FedEuroAcadMed French MoH speaker lapses into English on "binge drinking" - is there a word in French? Tells you something

— Martin McKee (@martinmckee) May 13, 2015

The morbidly obese bubblegumphobe is referring to this meme going around 'public health' circles that binge-drinking is uniquely British; that it is a behavioural disease which has now spread to our neighbours across la Manche. So frighteningly swiftly has this happened (despite British drinking culture being thousands of years old) that poor Ministry of Health politicians in Paris have not had time to coin a French word for it, apparently, so have pinched 'le binge-drinking' instead.

He may have a point, you know. The French are renowned throughout history for being crap at wars because they couldn't pitch a tent until they discovered that the English were doing something called 'le camping' - if only Napoleon had known that, eh? Likewise, their poor workers were toiling for seven days a week without respite for centuries until some Gallic traveller visited our shores and dscovered that we enjoyed two days off which we called 'le weekend', and when cars were invented those tortured Frenchies were driving around throughout the day and night before someone told them about the peculiar - but brilliant - British invention of 'le parking'.

Similarly, we Brits had never experienced déjà vu until the French taught us about it; we had no businessmen in this country until a wandering French entrepreneur enlightened us as to how trade was done; women went commando as a matter of course because underwear was only sold on these shores once the French imported lingerie; Britain was devoid of art until our continental neighbours taught us to paint; we couldn't beat eggs without the French teaching us about omelettes; and British people cast no shadows until we'd discovered people in France had seen mysterious things called silhouettes.

It all makes sense now, doesn't it?

Of course, there might be another explanation. You see, the French have always been pretty relaxed about their booze, it's why we like to go there and buy the stuff at dirt cheap prices. Wine is a family thing and is available in supermarché wire baskets at knock-down prices compared to here.

In Britain (and other English-speaking countries), however, we've always had finger-wagging temperance lunatics who like to sneer at the choices of others, and embark on moral panics about the hellfire and eternal damnation that will ensue if you dare to consort with the demon drink. Our history is sadly riddled with the rotten anti-social nerks. And the terminology these puritans create to support their irrational moral crusades necessarily involve terms like 'binge-drinking' to describe something as inconsequential as a couple of pints of Stella on a Sunday afternoon.

The only thing being imported into France is that twisted and illiberal mindset by way of the globalisation of miserabilism, whereby charmless and disloyal grunts like McKee attend international summits and run down his own country in order to spread the dictatorial 'public health' disease to other - previously relaxed - nations so that their people can suffer too.

That's why the French don't have a word for binge-drinking; it's because their own snobby social engineers aren't as imaginative with their self-aggrandising and illiberal vocabulary as the minging, long-practiced, career neo-temperance shitsticks we are cursed with in Britain.