pionentes!

Gentlemen, I’ll tell you the plain truth. Every day of the year when we take up a paper we read the opening of a murder. We say, This is good, this is charming, this is excellent! But, behold you! scarcely have we read a little farther before the word Tipperary or Ballina-something betrays the Irish manufacture. Instantly we loathe it; we call to the waiter; we say, ‘Waiter, take this paper; send it out the house; it is absolutely a scandal in the nostrils of all just taste.’ I appeal to every man whether, on finding murder (otherwise perhaps promising enough), to be Irish, he does not feel himself as much insulted as when, Madeira being ordered, he finds it to be Cape, or when, taking up what he takes to be a mushroom, it turns out what children call a toad-stool? Tithes, politics, something wrong in principle, vitiate every Irish murder. Gentleman, this must be reformed, or Ireland will not be a land to live in; at least, if we do live here, we must import all our murders, that’s clear.” Toad-in-the-hole sat down, growling with suppressed wrath; and the uprarious “hear, hear!” clamorously expressed the general concurrence.

On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, by Thomas De Quincey

They did, they goddam did it…