Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time
“We’ve redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!”
Favourite fuckin comedian
There is a story of a guy in England who sent a letter to his friend in Los Angeles. He asked him to “pop in” to New York City to see how his daughter is doing.
The LA guy wrote back and said it would be faster if he went himself.
I really don’t think Euros have a solid grasp of the scale of the US.
Here in Australia, during the 80’s, 90’s before widespread internet. There would be several European’s who needed rescuing each year as they decided to try and walk between major cities, because it looks close on a map.
I remember one German guy who needed rescuing while trying to walk from Sydney to Adelaide…that’s 1200km away…in a straight line.
Joke’s on him for wanting to go to Adelaide, honestly.
And remember, never go to Adelaide. It’s a hole (Not the Sunscreen Song)
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Also in Europe if you get hungry you can pick mushrooms, skin a boar, or pop in to a town. In Australia you got… witchetty grub
Lmao just looked on a map, and it’s quite easy to see that that distance is comparable to walking from Great Yarmouth to St Davids… twice
In the US, 100 years is a long time.
In England, 100 miles is a long distance.
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Hey now he got promoted once
In the delta quadrant, 70,000 years is a long distance
Lol, that’s great.
I’ve also heard of Europeans planning vacations in the US, expecting to see New York, Florida, Texas, LA, etc. without realizing how much travel that is.
I met a foreign exchange student in Australia. I asked what they were planning to do for their break.
They’d recently taken up surfing, and couldn’t decide if they wanted to surf the east, west, north, or south coast. So they had decided they would stay in Alice Springs, basically in the middle of all of them, and do day trips to each one.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that to get to the nearest ocean from there takes about two solid days of driving. Add another day to get to a beach with decent surf.
Found out the same between Tokyo and Okinawa. It’s like flying from Washington DC to Miami. “Just take a train,” is 32 hours, plus time on a ferry.
Not a really a day trip, even though it “seems like Japan is a small country.”
That’s more like saying to catch a train from Miami to Puerto Rico. No one is gonna build all that train line over the ocean for hundreds and hundreds of miles 😆
Canada has a highway that goes between the most easterly and westerly points of the country. If you drove from end to end, stopping only for gas and drive through meals, it would take you about a week.
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The most easterly and westerly points on the mainland. You’re not getting from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland by highway.
There are ferries.
That guy just have been a huge idiot, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people know how far away New York and Los Angeles are from each other.
I read that story in a book about the history of England: English history made brief, irreverent, and pleasurable.
The letter was from the 1800s I believe so maybe we can cut him some slack for not really knowing.
Ah right yeah fair enough! I thought you meant it happened in the past 15 years or something!
Shit if you’re in Los Angeles, you could spend 4 hours just to move 10 feet.
New York City has entered the chat.
Hawaii checking in. If a highway shuts down, book a hotel on the side you’re on.
Need some more trains.
there is traffic ahead of us
Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it’s not even the biggest.
Now we need somebody from Siberia to tell us how they can drive for 5000km and never leave their federal subject (I had to look that up, it’s what the different regions of Russia are called)
I’m not Siberian, but from what I’ve gathered from the talks of people who lived there, is that people in far east Russia have a weird sense of time and distance. You might be in in the middle of fuck nowhere with the closest living person being like a 100km away from you, but when you call them with some any dumb questions like “Hey do you happen to have a bottle opener?” they respond with “Sure, I’ll be there shortly” and then they do indeed arrive… in 4 hours. It’s as if they don’t have places to be, and it’s totally okay for them to spend an entire day driving to a shop or to friend to lend them a screwdriver. It’s especially baffling to people who lived their entire lives within ~40km Moscow’s ring road and they hear stuff like “Minsk? Sure, that’s like a hand’s reach away - only 720 kilometers. I’ll drop by on the weekend”.
I once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.
Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin’ donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat
People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.
eta: I’m specifically disparaging the southern US states here. They just flat-out use words wrong, and I can say that now that I’m too far away for them to kick my ass.
Except the guy you’re responding said ‘everywhere’
Thanks for sharing though.
I can see why you’ve read it that way, but I’m quite sure they’re saying that some people say a word slightly differently in another part of the USA and they’re joking that it makes them angry.
Oh I get it. The way it was written makes it a strange non sequitur.
Indeed!
Yes, this, thank you. Sorry, my jokes sometimes come off too aggressive online. I’m trying to work on that.
I think the commenter might have been talking about Americans in general.
So they take the opportunity whenever they can?
I just like to make stupid posts, sorry.
I’m right with you haha.
I thought about it and I say “whenever” pretty often.
It’s a weird thing to bother someone so much.
Whenever I think about the silly little things that bother people, I’m all, “Whatever could there reason be?”
But four a real problem, like one that should bug someone! I used to could go through a day without pain. I reckon I’m done got old.
Wander how the commenter wood fill about that. To much little stuff bothers folks. Shood worry about big thangs.
It’s a minor niggle I was joking about with hyperbole, but it does bother me a bit because ‘when’ means a specific time and ‘whenever’ means any of multiple times. Their meaning isn’t interchangeable.
Like: ‘I talked to my dad when he was in town’ means I talked with him that last time he was in town, but ‘I talked to my dad whenever he was in town’ means any or all the times he was in town – it might have been a hundred times or two, I can’t tell, but not the one time like the other more accurate sentence.
It doesn’t make me mad, but it very briefly ruffles my feathers. (e: and then I move right on)
I honestly get why it bugs you, there are things like that that bug me too. I can’t think of any at the moment (fairly intoxicated), but I definitely know of some words (not specifically at the moment, again, intoxicated) that irk me when misused. Not as much now that I’m older and I’ve met incredibly intelligent people who can’t even spell their own name. Well, that and my own ego has shrank by at least three quarters.
When I believed that I was some hyper intelligent alien, every misuse of a word made me cringe to my core.
At 38 years old (recently gained a year because for some reason I thought I was 39), I realize that I’m not shit and younger me just needed to feel superior for whatever reason.
I don’t know. I’m drunk. Sorry if I made no sense or was insulting in some way.
Hope you’re having a good night.
I remember this as, “Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time.”
Great way to look at it.
You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.
Yeah, define ‘driving’ lol
You can drive for 30 hours and still be on the same highway in the same state in Australia.
Damn, I thought the 22 hours to cross Ontario was long.
I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.
Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.
Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.
Man, in my neck of the woods, you can tell which town someone is from by accent. I’m not even joking or exaggerating. This is a rural area, with towns that are close in terms of driving distance, but that were originally formed by distinct immigrant groups. Even with TV amd radio kinda smoothing out accents in general, there’s still plenty of difference.
As an example, there’s a town maybe twenty minutes away where when they say yes and it’s “yay-us”. My town it’s more yeah-s as a single syllable. Two towns the other direction, it’s yeah-us. And that kind of difference is across everything, not just one or two words. The degree of drawl, whether or not you get elisions at specific places in words, it’s all part of it.
People from the dimwit town I grew up in pronounce garage as “gararge” it drove me insane. Also, the main attraction of the town is a gas station that sells ice cream.
Is it good ice cream?
Eh. Its ok. They had decent sundaes the last time I went like 6 years ago.
I just doubt it when I heard this argument, here in Brazil even your neighbor have a different accent cause they are son of two German, Lebanese, Japanese or Italian descendants and you are from the same but your other parent are from another culture and then you are so lost you create your own accent that sometimes speaks one or the other holy shit I don’t know who I am.
Dude, I LOVE Brazilians. I went for a little over 2 weeks in July. People were so nice, respectful, considerate, and laid back. I want to spend a month there next time I go.
Also, your bananas are on another level. I haven’t eaten a banana in the US since I got back.
i never really thought of it a code switching, but that’s an apt description. there’s definitely “professional” me and “hometown-accent-in-full-force” me.
Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.
Is this why I can hear my Finnish friend’s “generic euro” accent when no one else can?
(She travels a lot and has a very, very weak Finnish accent, but a fairly strong “generic European” accent. None of our other European friends can hear it; the only people who can are American and even then it’s inconsistent).
That’s a thing with us Europeans - especially if you don’t want to perfectly adopt a British or American accent. This is when you end up with the “euro accent” - you’re perfectly fluent in English, without the accent of your native language, but since its neither British nor American English, it sounds just the slightest bit different.
Also from IL, southern. Near StL. The accents change like a proximity ring the further or closer you get to downtown, and even then going Ozarks MO is still different from Troy IL.
When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.
I worked on the river so I got used to every southern and local accent as the line boats came through.
Because comparatively it doesn’t.
Your country simply hasn’t existed long enough pre industrialisation for a broad range of accents to develop.
The US isn’t a uniform age.
You get more hyper-local accents like the Boston, Philly and NYC accents in the older US cities, and fewer in places that haven’t been densely settled as long.
Is there a difference between a Las Vegas accent and a Pheonix or Los Angeles accent? Honestly, I don’t really know.
Still, there’s fewer hyper local accents and accents tend to be spoken over a wider area. Probably also because the US has had relatively large amounts of internal migration. Also, I assume average people travel further on average than they used to when wagons were the state of the art.
Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.
Then you compare that to say England, that has been around for several millenia and has had influence from Celtic, Gaelic, Norse, Germanic, French and even Spanish to extent for hundreds or thousands of years before America existed. And then since America existed has had influence from Indians, Chinese, enslaved Africans and other immigrant cultures from around the world, just like America did. Then its just not really comparable at all. 200 years is legitimately nothing on the time scales needed for the depth of accents to form and Americans just don’t understand that at all. It’s like a European talking about 100 miles being a long distance, an American would scoff at that idea.
Ok, if you’re going to talk accents, you have got to include Pennsylvania Dutch.
Everyone always talks about Southern accents, New England accents, Texas accents, Cajun, etc. Pennsylvania Dutch always gets left out, and I think it’s a fantastic accent.
Doug Madenford is my go to example:
Try in Italy, you drive 2 hours and you need subtitles for understanding the tv series filmed in that city
Yesterday I drove 4 hours and went from northern Minnesota to slightly-less-northern Minnesota.
Was it cold up there Margie?
Oh, you betcha. Yah.
So Grand Forks to Grand Rapids or there abouts eh?
Just about, yeah. Good ol’ route 2.
Weird. It takes 6-7 hours to go from Minneapolis to the Canadian border… So would you have been driving like Arrowhead to Morehead on back roads?
My wife and I drove from North Carolina, to Wisconsin, to South Dakota, and back to North Carolina again as a cross country road trip. We drove over four thousand miles.
It was fucking bizarre.
There comes a point where your mind can barely conceive that people are still speaking the same language. I think your monkey brain must assume that once you’re far enough away from home, then surely everything and everyone must be a foreigner.
And for sure, there are parts of the United States that seem to be literally foreign to one another, and there are parts of the Midwest that are such titanically empty swathes of corn fields and wind turbines that it seems like one has dropped into a parallel dimension.
But there’s something kind of awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word, that it’s all one big country, one big union of people who have (more or less) decided to engage in one big human project all together.
I think everyone should have a chance to make such a journey. It really crams the concept of the scale of this country into your consciousness in a way that can’t be done without actually covering the mileage, on the ground, for yourself.
If you’re originally from the Midwest you get the opposite experience:
There are places that you can’t tell what town you’re in, for miles and miles, because buildings are everywhere, and there are no cornfields or empty areas to separate cities. Cities are just allowed to grow into each other in some places.
Road trips were always the thing that made me appreciate America for what it is. If my only experience of America was the one place I lived, I probably wouldn’t like America as much as I do.
I’m soooo interested in driving from Florida to Alaska. I might do it next year.
As a Floridian, people from the Pacific Northwest might as well be foreigners to me. They are just very different from what I’m used to interacting with. They’re usually chill, accepting, quite socially conscious, into peculiar hobbies, and wear a lot of black. That’s uncommon here.
I once made a trip out west (I live near the East Coast) towards Yellowstone National Park. Some of the sights I saw were almost surreal.
There’s dozens of us out in the fields, dozens of us!
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That’s been banned now, right?
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Yeah, quite a few attempts made during the pandemic is what I heard
The wild thing is that the pandemic record will likely stand for a VERY LONG time, if it is ever beaten.
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Even then if it’s like a zombie pandemic it’s still not gonna happen with all those roaming corpses everywhere
It’s always been banned. Just like pot.
It’s always been illegal.
There is still a sign at the Portofino hotel in LA with the current record and it is definitely up to date.
In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday
Lol try Belgium, where driving 20 minutes is a different dialect and 1-2 hours is a different language.
