Comrade Number Eleven (XI)

September 30, 2014 

When President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China, visited India, an Indian Doordharshan television newsreader kept referring to the President as “President Eleven Jinping!”

Either the newsreader had an irrepressible sense of humour, or whole episodes of human history that passed that worthy by; she did not know that Latin was no longer the ‘lingua franca’ of the world and ‘Xi’ was pronounced somewhat like ‘Shki’ in English, rather than the numerical 11! Definitely Gibbon’s monumental work ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ was not on that worthy’s school reading list! Doordharshan promptly fired the lady.
Comrade Number Eleven (XI) by Thavam