# Help me with a small project on imagination (or lack thereof) **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 24, 2019, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991 "2019-04-24T13:45:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![eschrodinger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschrodinger/32/122_2.png) [@eschrodinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschrodinger)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2019, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/41 "2019-04-29T19:23:56Z")
Small number of round (made of sticks?) huts with conical roofs, dirt paths and open spaces around them, sunny dry climate (some part of Africa?), people moving around on foot, contemporary, but relatively low-tech society. (None of the places I’ve lived in the US or abroad have used “village” as a descriptor of our communities. My first, unprocessed sort of mental image is of a small community in a less wealthy foreign country, for reasons I could probably at least partly explain.) ---
**Author:** ![swampspruce](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/swampspruce/32/261_2.png) [@swampspruce](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/swampspruce)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2019, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/42 "2019-04-29T20:24:36Z")
A Village: Grassed Commons Post Office Main Street Diner/Cafe maybe attached to the only hotel Oddly enough, a well or common water pump. Functional at one time/ maybe still. Visually an eclectic mix of Midlands Britain in the early 1900s and 1950s small town America. People are kind but conscious of strangers and the dogs and kids free range throughout town, either roaming the town dump looking for treasure or behind the old blacksmith’s shop where all manner of interesting metal rusting objects are to be had. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2019, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/43 "2019-04-30T11:34:14Z")
this has been an interesting thread, but I’d like to point out something that not everyone may be aware of: a language discrepancy. The word “village” means something different in American English than in British English (or “european” English). There are no villages in America. There are lots of villages in England and Europe. So to Americans, “village” implies poor peasants , or Africans living without electricity–something very foreign. To Brits and Europeans, a village is what Americans call a “small town”, and is a familiar part of the country they live in. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2019, 12:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/44 "2019-04-30T12:49:54Z")
> [@naita](#): > > **Imagine a village** > > Now give me five core facts/descriptions about/of this village. Just the first that pop up in your mind. It has a population of around 9000 people. There’s a larger town somewhat nearby, and folks go there to shop for things they can’t get locally; But mostly the villagers like to stay in their secluded isolation. It isn’t compact, at least not for its population; it’s kind of strung out in strings and clusters, following some valleys and other terrain. They have a village government but they don’t do much governing; they legislate things like when barking dogs are loud enough to violate quiet enjoyment and they mediate arguments between neighbors and whatnot. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2019, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/45 "2019-04-30T12:55:25Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > this has been an interesting thread, but I’d like to point out something that not everyone may be aware of: a language discrepancy. > > The word “village” means something different in American English than in British English (or “european” English). > There are no villages in America. There are lots of villages in England and Europe. > > So to Americans, “village” implies poor peasants , or Africans living without electricity–something very foreign. > To Brits and Europeans, a village is what Americans call a “small town”, and is a familiar part of the country they live in. Except on Long Island 🙂 Around _here_, a Town is effectively a subdivision of a county. Everyone on the island lives in one of the towns unless they live in one of the three official Cities (I’m including NYC although when folks say “Long Island” they are often disincluding Queens & Brooklyn; there are two other Cities – Glen Cove and Long Beach). There’s no space _between_ towns, just like there’s no “no man’s land” between counties. So all the little municipalities don’t call THEMSELVES “towns”. They’re villages, or hamlets (yes, seriously), or some other quaint term. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2019, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/46 "2019-04-30T14:11:43Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > this has been an interesting thread, but I’d like to point out something that not everyone may be aware of: a language discrepancy. > > The word “village” means something different in American English than in British English (or “european” English). > There are no villages in America. There are lots of villages in England and Europe. > > So to Americans, “village” implies poor peasants , or Africans living without electricity–something very foreign. > To Brits and Europeans, a village is what Americans call a “small town”, and is a familiar part of the country they live in. I’d like to point out something you seem to be unaware of. Almost half of the US states formally define what a village is, and there are “villages” of different types all over the states. Or are you implying that in no place of the US does this fact influence how people think about the word village? > **[Village (United States)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States))** > > In the United States, the meaning of village varies by geographic area and legal jurisdiction. In formal usage, a "village" is a type of administrative division at the local government level. Since the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government from legislating on local government, the states are free to have political subdivisions called "villages" or not to and to define the word in many ways. Typically, a village is a type of municipality, although it... ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2019, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/47 "2019-04-30T17:18:54Z")
> [@naita](#): > > half of the US states formally define what a village is and Rhode Island is formally defined as a Plantation Colony. 🙂 But in common American language, people use the word “Town”, not village. If someone from lives in an incorporated village in New England, he will introduce himself to you as being from "a place called “Smithville, NJ, which is a small **town** near Atlantic City.” Contrast this with an Englishman or Frenchman, who will say “I live in a village called X” Village is a legal term, but not commonly used in daily conversation in the US. There are hundreds of songs about “my old home town”. Have you ever heard a country song where the guy sings about driving his truck to the village?. Or a cowboy movie where John Wayne threatens the bad guy by saying “this village ain’t big enough for the two of us”. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2019, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/48 "2019-05-01T03:21:01Z")
People around here do also use “village”, though. They are indeed very likely to say ‘I’m going into town’ when they mean ‘I’m going into the village’ (they’re already in a town, every place in New York State that’s not in a city is technically in a town even if the nearest neighbor’s a mile down the road); but that doesn’t mean the word “village” isn’t understood to mean local villages as well as far away ones. You see it all the time in the names of specific villages, as well as in saying such things as ‘it’s not the town zoning that applies here, you need to talk to the village about that’ or ‘of course the people in the town don’t pay village taxes, we don’t get village services either.’ Certainly when I responded to the poll I was thinking of villages in this area (though not of any specific one; as I was told to imagine one I assumed I was supposed to make it up.) There may well be places in the USA where people think of “village” as ‘something that only exists far away’; but it’s certainly not universal. ---
**Author:** ![eschrodinger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschrodinger/32/122_2.png) [@eschrodinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschrodinger)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2019, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/49 "2019-05-10T03:55:20Z")
Yes, I specified that none of the places I have lived in the US used that term to refer to the local communities precisely because I know there are places in the US that do. It may still be that the word is used differently in different English speaking countries as well, but it is not the case that it only refers to foreign places for all speakers of American English. ---
**Author:** ![Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/malleus_incus_stapes/32/3293_2.png) [@Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malleus_Incus_Stapes)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2019, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991/50 "2019-05-10T15:20:16Z")
1. It’s pre-industrial. 2. It’s somewhere cold, maybe arctic. (This may have popped into my head because “core idea” made me think of “ice core”). 2a) Yeah, definitely arctic. 3. There’s about eighty people. 4. They live next to the coast and hunt seals and… stuff? 5. They have rich story-telling tradition, because on long cold nights when the extended family is huddled around the fire and you have nothing else to do, it’s something to do. “Aunt’s/uncle’s tale” (they have a gender-neutral word for parents’ siblings) is the local idiom for a story that is obviously wildly exaggerated, but that you listen to anyway because it’s entertaining. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-with-a-small-project-on-imagination-or-lack-thereof/832991.md?page=2)