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

Thomas R. Wier writes:
 > [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@...>:
 >
 > 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.
 >

I'd say that's accurate enough, at least as far as states are
identified with _individual_ characteristics.  Most people do
probably identify stereotypical features with areas such as the south,
the midwest, and the west, and would have a chance of knowing into
which area a given state fell.  They would perceive very little
differentiation between states within the same area.

(I'm largely extrapolating from my own knowledge here - it's probably
not a bad guide to perceptions in Britain, but I can't say how well it
describes Europeans in general.  The British tend not to think of
themselves as Europeans, although it's possible to overstate this.)

 > >  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?
 >

No, in fact I've only visited once.  I derive my citizenship from my
mother*, and I have a "Certification of Birth Abroad of a Citizen of
the United States of America" signed by the vice-consul.  It was once
the case that such a dual national was required to "reside in the
United States for two consecutive years between the ages of fourteen
and twenty-eight to retain his/her United States citizenship", but
this requirement was removed before I was born.

*  Who has, through having been resident in the UK for the past few
   decades, not a bad example of a "mid-atlantic accent", in that she
   is taken for a foreigner in either country.  I haven't mentioned
   this in the thread on that subject because I'm not very good at
   identifying the features of an accent, particularly when it's one
   I'm very familiar with, and thus don't notice.

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