I found the doggie salute on Youtube. It was not very impressive: the stretched paw looked more like a cat trying to steal a dainty off a dining-room table when nobody was looking. But the accompanying commentary was apparently enough to alert Britain’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

A pug dog looks like a cute miniature of a bulldog, formerly a symbol of Britain and of Winston Churchill. Might someone see an insult to a national symbol?

On a tangent: Stalin’s prosecutor A. Ya. Vyshinsky once ridiculed some show-trial defendants as “moski i shavki, raz”yarivshiesya na slona” (“Pug dogs and puppies thing to mount an elephant.”

John, all you’ve proven is that in the last 600 or so years, we’ve progressed so much that today, the PC police would shut down any play by The Bard on opening night:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Maybe he should have tried something else, something more . . . classically English?

Two Gentlemen of Verona: “Thou subtle, perjur’d, false, disloyal man!”
As You Like It: “Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous.”
Measure For Measure: “Thou art a flesh-monger, a fool and a coward.”
Henry IV Part 2: “You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian!”
Henry IV Part 1: “You clay-brained guts, you knotty-pated fool, you whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch, you starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish. O for breath to utter what is like thee, you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!”

I gotta stop there. Who could do better than that?