Re: CHAT: Ability of Americans & Europeans to locate each others cities (was Re: The [+foreign] attribute)

[Sorry for the lateness of this reply.  I just returned from a
week of a funeral in Waco and visiting old friends in Austin, so
I'm now deluged with 500 emails...]

Quoting Tim May <butsuri@...>:

> Thomas R. Wier writes:
>  > Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:
>  > > Anyway, most Americans wouldn't be able to correctly situate Paris and
>  > > Prague...
>  >
>  > That's true.  And most Europeans would probably have difficulty
>  > situating St. Louis and Chicago.  (I remember an anecdote on
>  > sci.lang several years ago to that effect.)
>
>  Personally, I could locate Paris easily enough, I'd have a fair
>  chance with Chicago and I could find the right country for Prague on
>  an unlabelled political map (couldn't tell you any closer than that,
>  though), but I'd have very little chance of locating St. Louis (well,
>  I would _now_, I just went and found it on the big map, but it took
>  me a while).
My friend once put it this way, teasingly: for Europeans, there
are really only three, perhaps four, U.S. States with salient,
individual cultures and characteristics:  New York (cultured
and worldly), California (innovative and laid-back), Texas
(ignorant, gun-toting, with fascist tendencies), and perhaps
Florida ("sunny" dispositions and problems with voting systems).
All others fall into the "Here Be Dragons" category.

>  And I've got Anglo-American dual citizenship - my
>  flatmate last year didn't know Washington state was different from
>  Washington DC.
Oh? Have you ever lived in the States?

>  Continentals may of course be far better informed.  I wouldn't care
>  to speculate.
To my recollection, the aforementioned anecdote involved
Germans who thought St. Louis was where Chicago is located.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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