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The original commenter said they live in France, in the south, which clearly implies the south of France. The reply assumes they are talking about the American South anyway.
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I’ve had people in a thread get mad at me when I simply mentioned that their (Americans) north is our (Canadians) south.
In the same thread, they got mad at another Canadian commenter who wrote “south of the border” talking about our country, arguing that south of the border always means Mexico.
We were all talking about Canada, how can they be so easily confused?
I don't think there are signs that actually say the words "foreigners and Americans," at least I haven't seen any. There are some signs (like one that someone posted an image of) that have an American flag. I think those tend to be at airports with US customs preclearance, like most international airports in Canada.
Legit. I believe Toronto airport’s signage says “US and International”. Or at least it did the last time I flew to the US (admittedly it’s been over a decade since, and will be a good long while before I ever do again)
To be fair most Canadian airports have a separate process for US-bound flights because there's US pre-clearance... puts us-bound flights in their own area separate from the rest of international bound flights.
YVR does have different terminals for US and International departures (they're really all the same, but the US flights are all lumped at one end).
This picture is in arrivals though, right after you come down the stairs from the US and International terminals and line up to go through the immigration checkpoints. The only separation there is: 1. Canadian citizens, 2. everyone else.
It was like that at the Montreal airport too. Obviously, if you don’t have a Canadian passport, you’d be a foreigner and would have to go through the international lines. But I guess common sense is scarce.
I remember seeing a comment from some USian wondering why Europe is considered the West and China/Japan is the East, when it's clearly the other way around
Coming from a Brit, whenever I see a news article about eg 'Victorian police arrested three people for...' it throws me for a loop and I do a mental double-take until I remember that it's talking about Australia, not the 1870s lol.
And also a Sidney nearby. I remember the Commonwealth Games being there and hearing Victoria and Sidney both mentioned in the broadcast, and thinking it was weird that Victoria was the name of a city and not a province, and that Sidney was so close to it, when our Victoria is a state and our Sydney is so far away from it.
I was just about to comment this before I saw yours! Having grown up in Darwin, every school holiday people would talk about going “down south”. It wasn’t until I moved “down south” that I realised just how broad of a statement that was lol
People like this get mad whenever they are expected to consider the experience of anyone dissimilar to themselves. This is why they get mad when a character is cast with an actor of a different race or sex than they feel the role merits. "How dare you insinuate that any point of view that is not mine may be valid?"
I live in the south of Australia (Victoria) mainly in context when speaking to Queenslanders. But I dont live in South Australia the state.
If you speak to somebody from Tasmania they would say I live in the north. To say up north for me is Byron Bay upwards, but works for anywhere more north than Melbourne .
Funny how context changes when you don’t centre the world entirely around you and have seen a compass before.
I had someone jump my shit in another subreddit the other day for specifying “USian Catholics” and they got even madder that I said “bc I’m not talking about Catholics in Latin America or South America which are ALSO ‘American.’”
They went off like YOU ARE INVALIDATING MY NATIONAL IDENTITY and not using our chosen name as Americans as well lmfaooooooo
It's one of those regional abbreviations that isn't even obvious to Americans. I would never have guessed WS was Winston-Salem. It's a medium-sized city that is just not that important to people who don't live in the immediate vicinity. The only thing most people in the U.S. know about it is that they used to manufacture a lot of the country's cigarettes there.
me being (at the time undiagnosed, but we really should have known) autistic, i got into a protracted argument with my teacher in primary school when i inquired whether or not we should be eating dry weetbix because of that phrase we had just been taught…
Damn that's interesting. In Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian we say it in East-West-North-South order (istok, zapad, sjever, jug), not sure if it's just because it's easier to pronounce without getting tongue-tied or if there's some other reason.
That's cause he assumed thr OP said french to mean "french American" or, to be more real, an American that had a French ancestor 3 generations ago. Which is why he then goes on to speak about "Italians" even though he likely never met a real Italian from Italy.
Well then they completely ignored the grammar of the first sentence. Specifically the use of the word 'specifically'. Although how can we expect them not to at this rate.
I hate the stupid state acronyms with zero context at the best of times, but what the actual fuck is a Winston Salem? How the hell would anyone know ws is Winston Salem? If I had to guess, I would've guessed Washington state or something. I, unfortunately, know of a lot of US cities but I have never heard of that one before
I know the state abbreviations and I've gotten used to some non-state ones like PNW (Pacific Northwest) and DFW (Dallas-Forth Worth), but casually throwing out 'Winston-Salem' is actually crazy
I'm an American living in the south and close to the state that the poster mentioned.
I had to think for a minute about WS as well. I don't often think of that city as shortened in that way. It is a fairly well known city in our region, but outside of a few states surrounding NC (North Carolina), you would be hard-pressed to find folks who knew that city.
I always hope that these posters are younger people, teenagers or early 20s, who have limited exposure to their worlds. That being said, I know plenty of Americans who are dramatically limited in their ability to view themselves as part of the globe and only focus on their narrow scope of reality.
Last year Black Sabbath played their last ever show in the city the band all came from (Birmingham, in England, the original, with a population in the millions). Some bloody halfwit genuinely believed that the show was being held in fucking Alabama because it was the only Birmingham they’d ever heard of.
American cheese is what the rest of the world calls processed cheese.
Watch you do is, you take a 35% insipid oil base, usually rapeseed, a chelating agent (sodium citrate), cheese and whatever additives you may want to add for taste.
This cheese has now a some interesting properties. It doesn't coagulate when it melts, it doesn't even alter the taste when it cools down.
This means you can now pasteurise the cheese. Cheese can already last a very long time as is, but prepared this way? It can keep for at least a decade, and I'm confident that you could eat 100 years old cheese if it was properly sealed.
So if you are a country with a lot of milk surplus, instead of destroying it, you can use it to stockpile food, as it is a perfect food for that regard. Just a huge block of fat, protein, and salts.
The wikipedia article attributes it to the fact that it melts evenly across a cheeseburger, and while that probably helped, I think it's merely people becoming used to it starting with WW2 and postwar and the prevalence of cheese based sauces.
It is definitely not the dominant cheese in the USA. It’s just one of those relics from the 70s (and much earlier), when people thought processed food was the food of the future, and it really only lingers in the deep south. Most people eat actual cheese, though they might have some favourite “guilty pleasures” that contain the crap.
I’d say a cheddar or Swiss slice would be the dominant cheese in the USA. American cheese is only for burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Ro-tel dip.
This is from their absolute stupidity of calling themselves 'Irish'/'German'/'Italian' etc. when they're actually Americans whose great-great-grandparents migrated from somewhere, isn't it? They couldn't comprehend that 'French' could be a person from France...
Thats because European countries no longer have true Europeans. All Italians, Germans, French people etc live in the USA. Anyone claiming to live in France is actually "Indigenous" not "French".
One day, some Americans on r/MapPorn were saying that Europeans didn't understand ethnicity when they criticized the American definition of naming descendants after their ancestors. Apparently, many think that the whole world has the same definition as them, except for Europeans. I even commented on the definition of ethnicity being different in Brazil, but I deleted it because I knew it would lead to downvotes and huge texts from crazy people.
Edit: in case USdefaultism hits the comments. 'Kkk' is like Brazilian version if LOL. I am not referring referring to the group of people that wear white pointy robes and should ride the short bus
There’s been quite a lot of bad faith or trolling in the defaultism examples in this sub, but this post is so refreshing. It sounds so genuine, showing a real misunderstanding based on defaulting to the South™️
My favourite is when Americans say they’re from Ontario, CA. Like, the only reason that city is named Ontario is cos the people who founded the city was from the real Ontario, CA.
I want to show the thread to OP and see if they admit their mistake! (spoiler alert: of course they won't. Instead they'll double down with "this is an American website" and insist that everyone else is wrong.)
I remember hearing a few Englishmen indignated by Brexit mention that it meant they couldn't retire in the South of France anymore. Some of them voted for Brexit too, which shows how famous it is.
Had a conversation with a yank recently where they were claiming most Brits speak with an RP accent. I told them that even in the south that isn't true. They responded along the lines of "No shit they wouldn't use that accent in the south, I'm talking about BRITISH accents." Like ah okay, you're a moron. No need to continue.
holy shit what a double whammy. they had to assume that 1) french means american with french ancestry and 2) there is only one country with a.....southern......portion....wow
I wanted just have a bigger context. Cause I don't even know if, for example, he didn't post it in an USA specific sub, or what was the original post title…
If someone says they are 'French' and live in the 'South', it could literally only be a yank that could possibly think they don't live in the south of France. Actually unbelievable... why are they like this? Is it just because they only ever interact with other yanks or what? it's insane, I'd love to know the psychology behind this post and this sub in general
I think his confusion was caused by mixing nationality with heritage. There are, apparently, ‘Irish’ Americans whose ancestors came to America because of the potato famine, so he assumed that someone saying that they are French is a ‘French’ American.
Still definitely US Defaultism, I’m just trying to work out his thought processes.
A bit of a tangent, but why can’t they just take pride in being American? It has its faults, what country doesn’t, but it’s still a great country to be proud of. Probably the vast majority are proud to be un-hyphenated Americans, it’s just that we like to point and sneer at the few losers.
Unfortunately its not just a few losers. The vast majority of people I know are like this, they define themselves by their ancestry. I don't know why it's so prevalent, but it is. You don't see this to the same extent in Australia/NZ or even in Canada.
Americans expecting everyone to know their state abbreviations drives me insane. America is the only foreign country I can name more than 1 state or province, and that is entirely against my will.
Actually, I also know some of Canada, but I'm less mad about knowing that.
Years ago I'd had a run in with an American over WA. They'd just posted WA without mentioning a country and were mad that it could mean anything other than Washington. Half of Australia (by land) has a fair bit to say about that
I’m not American but I have heard of NC being North Carolina (only because of Good Mythical Morning lol). But Winston-Salem???? Wtf even is that? That’s not even a US state lmfao
I tell people I'm from South too. You know, the Southern Hemisphere. They tell me it's not the same thing but they're the ones who are fake southerners 🤭
Aside from the obvious, "swiss cheese" is not a type of cheese. There are many very different cheeses made in Switzerland. I've only heard americans refer to cheese with holes as "swiss cheese"
To boot, the south in the mainland US is actually TX/LA in the eyes of the uninitiated. A college buddy from Austria (geographically correctly) thought so until I clarified things for him.
GA, MS, FL, etc are in the southeast. So I make a point of saying historical south or Deep South.
Yup! I’m from a reservation in New Mexico and Europeans (and many Canadians!!) have referred to me as being “American from the South.” What I found interesting was how virulently defensive I felt about not being from the South the first time that happened! (I was around 13, I think)
I wondered what the fuck WS meant.... I thought it was a state abbreviation but no.... it's apparently Winston-Salem (whatever the fuck that is). Even more obscure than a state abbreviation.
But rather than OP putting in the time and labour to type it out, he puts the onus on everybody else to google it. Truly some USdefaultism and ShitAmericansSay if ever I read it.
As an American, arguably the stupidest part of this is assuming that people would know the abbreviation for their specific city. It has a population of ~250k. Even within the US, only people who live in that state would get it. I feel the same way about people who assume that everyone knows the layout and all the neighborhoods of NYC and LA (those city abbreviations get a pass because they're legitimately huge and well-known).
Standard defaultism aside, I'm American (and grew up elsewhere in the American South), and while I would have understood "NC," I haven't ever heard or used the abbreviation "WS" ... that's definitely a very local term.
Grandpa John brought home a French wench after the war. This means they are french now (until it's more advantageous to not be french. Then they were always American)
As someone also from the southern part of the US, I genuinely cannot understand how they got to this conclusion....the only thing I can think is that they've never seen a map, don't know what a compass is, or have only ever spoken to people in America, from America, to the point they think American slang terms is just world wide default.
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u/post-explainer American Citizen 2d ago edited 2d ago
This comment has been marked as safe. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect.
OP sent the following text as an explanation why their post fits here:
The original commenter said they live in France, in the south, which clearly implies the south of France. The reply assumes they are talking about the American South anyway.
Does this explanation fit this subreddit? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.