Great Falls also has the distinction of appearing in the lyrics of Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio:
Just two lonely truckers from Great Falls, Montana
And a salesman from places unknown
All huddle together in downtown Toledo
To spend their big night all alone
Toledo also being familiar as the hometown of MAS*H’s Cpl. Klinger.
To the OP – pretty familiar with major US cities and their states, had the opportunity to visit a few, (including Chicago a couple of times), and work for an NZ company owned by a US Corp. out of Omaha, NE. State capitals are largely a mystery with a few exceptions: Olympia, WA (which I’ve driven past), Madison WI (having been around the area visiting Milwaukee, Kenosha, and Lake Geneva), and Des Moines, IA (which I visited… but it was closed).
The size of the place takes a bit of getting used to – but when you’ve had to fly 12 hours to get to LA, somehow another few to get to Chicago doesn’t seem so odd.
Not to worry. State capitals are largely a mystery to us, too.
I had a little argument with a coworker today. How we got on the subject, I have no idea, but…
He said that Springfield was the capital of Massachussetts. I said no, it was Boston. He said no, it couldn’t be Boston. I said that it definitely was. He said it definitely wasn’t.
I said that he just assumed that it couldn’t possibly be Boston, because Boston is the biggest and most well-known city in the state, and therefore it couldn’t be the state capital. And that Springfield is the capital of Illinois, so he’s probably just confused. He admitted that I might be right.
So we look it up and of course, it’s Boston. But he did point out that the N.B.A. Hall of Fame is indeed in Springfield, Massachussetts.
So, it’s like you have to remember that the state capitals are not the cities you’d assume were the capitals except in the cases that where the state capitals are the cities you’d assume were the capitals.
Most average Japanese are not aware of the names of many states and can only rarely put cities in them. California and New York are well known, but it can quickly get spotty after that. I’d be surprised if more than 10% could name Illinois when given Chicago.
Certain cities become well known for any number of reasons, including being the locations of MLB teams with Japanese players. Hence, a vast majority of adults know the city of Seattle, but very few know that city is in Washington.
OTOH, some states are more famous than their cities. Texas, for example, is quite well-known for cowboys and Westerns, but few Japanese could even name any of the major cities.
Oddly, both Salt Lake City and Utah are well-known. There were a couple of famous TV personalities from Utah, and the state was from complete anonymity to fame as a backwater state within a few years. Salt Lake got on the map because of the Winter Olympics. Now that a new generation has grown up without the thick-glassed gaijin foreigner on TV, and as the memories of past sport events die, I suspect my native home town and state will once again fade into oblivion.
Yeah. When I lived in NYC, a whole lot of people had no idea where Cleveland is . . . and that it’s only about 450 miles from NYC, not half-way across the country. And there was lots of confusion between Ohio and Iowa.
Just an observation. With all of the relatively obscure cities mentioned in the thread so far, I’m surprised that there was but a single mention (in passing) of Houston, Texas, which is the fourth largest city in the U.S.
Hell, Waco got mentioned, and it barely makes the top 200!
New Yorkers are famous for not knowing where (or what) anything west of the Hudson is, frankly. They can find Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey and other New England states on a map, but after that… it’s all fly over country. Or so the legend goes.
The square states, there in the middle between the East Coast and California.
I’ve driven the length of 80 several times so I know where a lot of that is. Not quite so clear on the South, only really spent any time in North Carolina. I hope to collect all 50. I’ve decided that the rule is you’ve only really been to a place if you’ve spent the night there.
There is a North Chicago, Illinois and an East Chicago, Indiana which might lead to the locals adding the state on to any city with “Chicago” in it to minimize confusion - the distinction between, say, the east side of Chicago, Illinois and East Chicago, Indiana. I have no idea if that would account for it, but it may be a factor.
On the other hand, if you did say “east side of Chicago” you might get a puzzled look and “Oh, Lake Michigan?”. The southeast side of Chicago is usually lumped in with the rest of the south side, with “east Chicago” being on the other side of the state border.
More confusing is the proximity of Lake County, Illinois and Lake County, Indiana to each other - at least they aren’t adjacent, but weather and traffic reports can be confusing to useless without the state name appended to the county.
Whereas in the USA, you have to answer when asked what you do, and the questioner gets to make several snap judgments about you.
No wonder it’s frowned upon other places. Personally, I fib. I’ve often told people that what I do part-time was really full-time. Especially women, who need to see the chain on your ankle.
As an Iowan based in metro NY, I have decided that the confusion is not so much an honest lack of knowledge - middle-aged people who had to take geography do it too - so much as an automatic disdain for unimportant details. Outside of the Cleveland and Cincinnati sports franchises, Ohiowidaho, their people, culture, and commerce have nothing whatsoever to do with the average, or even above-average, New Yorker. I imagine more of the latter folks could differentiate the three Baltic republics than tell the Mother of Presidents from the Hawkeye State from Famous Potatoes.
I don’t know about that, but “and what do you do?” is surely a common icebreaker? I mean I’ve met people at parties and they’ve said things like “I wont ask what you do, because everybody asks that” - that is, they don’t want to ask such a clichéd question. Maybe such a sentiment has been mistranslated somewhere the line into “Brits don’t ask each other what they do for a living”.
I don’t think it’s a faux pas if you’re chatting with someone at a party, but the example given seemed to be a momentary conversation on the street between complete strangers.
Actually, under those circumstances I probably wouldn’t ask an American either…
Although Ohio and Virginia both claim to be the home states of eight presidents (there’s a struggle over which state William Henry Harrison belongs to), I’ve never heard of Ohio actually calling itself the “Mother of Presidents.” It’s usually the Buckeye State.
Thanks to John Denver and Klinger, far too many people know about Toledo, that’s for sure. I mean…Toledo, OH has a Wikipedia page. Someone actually took the time to do that. I hope they’re happy. Now people across the globe are going to be drawn in by the exciting promise offered by:
“The University of Toledo fields teams in many intercollegiate sports, quite a number of which enjoy loyal followings by Toledo sports fans.”
“Freight rail service in Toledo is operated by the Norfolk Southern, CSX Transportation, Canadian National, Ann Arbor, and the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway. All except the Wheeling have local terminals; The Wheeling operates into Toledo from the east through trackage rights on Norfolk Southern to connect with the Ann Arbor and the CN.”
and most of all: “The world famous Tony Packo’s Cafe is located in the Hungarian neighborhood on the east side of Toledo known as Birmingham, and features hot dog buns signed by celebrities.”
Sadly, I’m afraid they’ll find it’s all marketing glitz, and the real Toledo can never measure up to the dazzling city described on Wikipedia.
