In honor of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the United States this week, I’d like to share some of the more choice statements of her husband, Prince Philip, who, Anglophile that I am, is the living embodiment of why it’s a good thing that the Queen does not rule over us. One of the perks of being a British monarch is world travel. But wherever Prince Philip goes, he seems to get into trouble asking the natives the sorts of questions a colonial administrator circa 1880 might have pondered. Courtesy of the BBC, here are a few: -- In a 1986 visit to China, he told a group of British expatriate students, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.” -- Referring to an outdated fusebox at an Edinburgh factory, he remarked, “It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.” -- In Australia, he once asked a group of Aborigines, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” -- “If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it,” he said in 1986. -- And my personal favorite: “Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?” (asked of an inhabitant of the Cayman Islands in 1994). God Save the Queen. --James Kirchick