Re: Do you want a French "little" or a Dutch "little"? :))

H. S. Teoh writes:
 > On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 05:14:00PM -0400, Nik Taylor wrote:
 > [snip]
 > > Yeah, I think most Americans would consider a 100-year-old building to
 > > be very old.
 > [snip]
 >
 > Whereas in places like England, people would laugh at you if you pointed
 > at a 100-year-old building and called it "very old".
 >

Well, a 100-year-old English building isn't as outrageously old as a
100-year-old American or Australian building*, but it's still older
than the buildings most people live and work in.  You probably
wouldn't call it very old, but it'd still be an old building (despite
the fact that you could find something five times that age not so far
away, if you looked).  Context-dependent.

These days most people have little historical perspective anyway,
regardless of where they live.  At least, so it appears to me.


* I don't mean to imply that the age of these buildings literally
  incites outrage in the former colonial nations, of course.

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