“We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.
    First off, we should enact an ‘e’ tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary ‘e,’ such as shoppe or olde, and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per ‘e.’ We should also consider an additional $50,000 ‘ye’ tax, so that the owner of a store called ‘Ye Olde Shoppe’ would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as ‘Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,’ the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.”

—Dave Barry, Ye Olde Humor Columne, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.