Surely everyone would get Florida. We’re the flaccid penis.
Never heard of the Shoshone National Park before.
There are a couple of jinks on the western boundary of Colorado due to surveying errors. Looking at the map, there seem to be couple of others along the southern boundary. None seem to be quite as large as the ones along Wyoming’s northern boundary through Yellowstone National Park, however, which are also due to surveying errors. Besides the slight differences in proportions, the jinks provide a way to distinguish the two states, at least if you had a map that was accurate at a large enough scale.
You’d be right, I’m sure. Many Americans are terrible about world geography, let alone USA geography. My sister was a Geography Professor at the university with the largest (then) geography department in the US. She liked to give tests to freshmen: given a blank sheet of paper, draw the outline of the USA’s lower 48. Some results were truly comical. I think I’ve seen similar test results on the internet.
Thanks for this, Colibri. It’s funny, but that article shows the paradoxical irregularities in the state boundary, and it’s just southwest of the town of Paradox, Colorado. 
I shirt you not.
See here on the map: Google Maps
The various subdivisions within Germany and Italy spent a few centuries as independent states (albeit with shifting borders and alliances). Those have to be pretty iconic.
I wonder if there are any other countries besides Aussie and US that do this with their “state” or “province” shapes. I hate to say this, I too look at maps of countries like Mexico and see hard to memorize “blobs”.
USA sports logos:
Australia most definitely. And more so than in the US I suspect, in that all the states use their outlines. Since, as pointed out above, we don’t have any undistinguished rectangles to worry about, it would be a very rare adult Australian that could not instantly recognise all the the states from their outlines. Further, it is common for states to use their outline as the basis for a distinguishing mark. Government agencies in the states will use a mark of the state’s outline on documents, and most states have had tourism campaigns with graphic design based around their state’s outline.
The outlines of the states are sufficiently well known to have become rooted in popular parlance. If you ask a girl to show you her map of Tasmania, the meaning is perfectly understood by any Australian.
If you have to rotate them, NT and SA could be confused.
Of course NT might make it into the list of states as “the bit left over when the states are removed”… T for territory. Stupid Country. Merge NT into QLd (or WA or SA , as suboptions.) , and SA into WA, and merge Tas into Vic. Merge ACT suburbs into NSW.
If the USA still looked like the USA, but the states rejiggered, by Randall Munroe. Quite extraordinary. I don’t know where/if he cheats much.
A nice icon for this thread.
I’d call it trapezoidal.
Florida: America’s wang!
Catchy tourism slogan.
Apparently on a smaller scale as well — French state/ Euro bureaucrats are prolly on some demented vision of making everywhere as dull and indistinct as American states:
An hour ago I saw a Japanese drawing of Moret-sur-Loing, home of Sisley, where the Impressionists roamed; so I looked it up. Charming would be the word. An OK mediaeval town but not that different from 1000s of other Western European towns. Houses not bad, but tiny by American standards. Wiki said:
On 1 January 2015, Moret-sur-Loing and Écuelles merged becoming one commune called Orvanne, which merged into the new commune Moret-Loing-et-Orvanne on 1 January 2016
Really? Interesting, I’d have though most would know their own country. I’m from Warwickshire, which has a huge great hole in it where they removed a chunk and made the West Midlands.
I guess a large part of this is size. US states are country-sized. I know the shape of a lot of countries.
On the other hand, I can also recognize the shape of my own county, as (I think) can many other people from around here. At least, the last time I said “that splotch that’s shaped like Cuyahoga County”, the other five people present understood what I meant.
Then again, most US counties aren’t anywhere near as distinctive as Cuyahoga (which is right on the edge of the state, on one of the natural-feature borders), and most of them are just basically rectangles.
I’m not sure how merging the communes is supposed to diminish the charms of Moret-sur-Loing?
The merged commune incorporates four former communes, three of which were so depopulated as to be unviable, hence the merger. Montarlot, before the merger, had a population of just 220; Épisy had just 510. Did they each really need their own mayor and municipal council with the same powers as the City of Paris?
The US did do a pretty amazing job of shaping all the states so that they fit together snugly, though.
Since it got resurrected anyway… for Spain it’s more likely to be the regions than the provinces; those provinces which get used a lot happen to be those that are a region by themselves. There are also some supra-regional silhouettes which are commonly used but whose exact form varies by the purpose for which they’re being used.
Which has nothing to do with the OP’s question:
The problem is that UK counties are not fixed entities. They were for centuries, but in the past 50 years or so they have been mucked about with repeatedly. I used to live on the borders of Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey. Now I live on the borders of Hampshire, Bracknell Forest, Wokingham and Surrey. We’ve seen abominations like “Avon” and “Humberside” come and go, Rutland disappear and rise from the dead, and don’t even ask me what the hell is going on in Wales.
If you ask someone what county a given town is in, the answer will usually be “it depends”.
True. But Somerset and Dorset (where I grew up) have mostly remained the same shape, and certainly didn’t change while I was living there. But yeah, I wish they’d stop mucking about with counties.