This happened to me too! We drove through New Jersey and it was gorgeous, all green and full of trees and stuff. Since I have spent most of my life in the drier, browner parts of California, it was not exactly my idea of a hideous blot.
Geico in Spain too.
Most American comic books are sold here as well. The main reason why there aren’t more Spaniards drawing comic books for Marvel is that Manhattan is too bloody far. And we get a lot of European and Latin American comics that it would be difficult to get in the States.
Current TV shows usually take a year or less to reach us, so no problem. Normally by the time I start seeing a show referenced (here or elsewhere) as “something people know about”, it’s already on TV here.
Mentions of TV personalities in movies, sitcoms and so forth are always a bit of a problem. Most people over here wouldn’t recognize Oprah if she went to their house with a Tshit saying “hi, I’m Oprah Winfrey” and four big black bodyguards, but we’ve all heard the name in sitcoms and movies. Most people have the idea that she’s “some black lady who’s on TV Over There and apparently changes weight a lot”.
Same for old TV shows that were never shown here. Bonanza we know (one of my aunts used to be able to recite whole stretches of it), Little House on the Prairie we know… but wth is “The three stooges” or “The Beverly Hillbillies”? Those of us who pay attention have figured it out from all the mentions they get buuuuut…
The amount of Americans who think that everybody Over Here must know who the Grateful Dead are. We know the skull icon and the bears (again, second hand reference) but, excuse me here, when I found out that they were known mostly for LIVE performances which btw took place Over There, I wanted to smack quite a few people over the head! I don’t expect people Over There to know spanish bands… at least, not the ones that haven’t been up for the latest round of MTV Latinos.
Education
I understand Elementary school (we call it Primary School here, but same deal), High School, and university, but where does “college” fit in? In Australia, a “college” is either a part of a university (the traditional sense) or an adult education alternative to university (usually in more applied skills), but in the US it seems to be some sort of intermediate stage between high school and university. What is it it?
Gun culture
I kinda like guns in some ways, and I don’t want this to be controversial, but buying a gun in a department store? Really? That’s just… odd.
School buses
Here, school buses are just regular buses hired by the school from the local bus company. They’re not yellow or anything. What’s with that classic design? Are they still built with the engine mounted forward like that, or are they all really old? Do the schools really own their own buses? Why? Who drives them? From TV show it seems to be a parent or someone. Volunteers?
Railroads
Why do long distance stations never seem to have platforms? People always seem to have to climb down to track level. You’re the richest nation on the planet, so why not a slab of concrete or something?
Politics
Non-political positions are political. Do you actually ELECT people like dog-catchers and rangers? Do they campaign? The impression I get is that they do.
Doctors, lawyers, etc
Similar to the above - do they really have big, flashy advertisements? “WE’LL GET YOU OFF YOUR SECOND MURDER CHARGE FOR HALF PRICE!” Professional people advertising like that here is a big no-no.
I can’t speak for Americans, but in the UK, football (soccer) teams aren’t allocated according to “need” by any national authority. They were founded independently by local people who wished to have a local team, and applied to join their national or local league at an appropriate level. London has over a dozen professional soccer teams playing at various levels of the league system. If the fan base is there to support this number of teams, why should anyone want to restrict the number?
What’s a 411? and a 101?
From the top of my head seen from topics in MPSIMS: what are babyshowers? Do you have ridiculously dirty children so you have to invite a whole bunch of people to clean them?
K
411 is the number you call to get ‘information,’ to get a person or business’ phone number. In slang (particularly TV youth slang, not spoken by real people), the 411 is the basic facts.
101 is the number in a college catalogue to indicate it is an intro class. English 101, for example is English class for first year students. Used in slang it means basic information everyone should know.
In Spain, the city of Barcelona (city 3M, metropolitan area 4M) has more adult, non-school, usually-sponsored soccer teams than the rest of the country combined. Two of them are usually on the First Division. Should several thousand people stop playing soccer every weekend just because better-paid folks already do it?
No, it’s the mother-to-be who gets “showered with gifts” before the baby is born.
Americans seem to have a lot of ceremonies for everything… I’ve heard mention of people having as many as 3 “bridal showers” - plus a separate “hen’s night”! If I lived in a place with customs like those I’d elope.
College = University. The two terms are interchangable here. You’ve got your grade school, your high school, then college, THEN…shudder real life.
Gun culture: Read the Second Amendment. Because of that semi-vague piece of writing, some of us see having guns as some kind of right, be it a right to defend yourself, your family, and property, a birthright, or just a right that was guaranteed to us so we should exercise it. Guns in department stores? Yeah, in some of them, you can, but it’s pretty toned down. In the stores I’ve seen that have guns, they’re in “sporting goods” and in a big glass case. There could be other controls and measures, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t like guns.
Railroads: Here’s something for ya. We rarely USE railroads. Sure, we’ve got some pretty popular and well-used lines connecting Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Philly, and a few of the other major cities on the east coast. Outside of that, railroads are more or less nonexistant for passengers. When going through a choice of how to get around, trains are virtually not on the list.
Politics: Dog catchers don’t get elected (at least not in my area, and not as far as I’m concerned). Making references to dog catchers getting elected is, as you’ve picked up, hyperbole. Rangers? Not so much. There isn’t even a “ranger” post here, so you could be talking about something else.
Doctors/Lawyers: Doctors don’t have super flashy advertising per se. You’ll have some of your doctor reality tv shows, which are, in essence, advertisements. Doctors do have commercials and have some print ads (such as in the paper), but they’re not usually flashy or tacky. Lawyers, on the other hand…they’re pretty much the opposite. Much tack, more flash. They’re lawyers, whadda ya expect? Lawyers don’t advertise like THAT, though. They’re not going to advertise that they’ll get you a plea bargain or anything that technical. They usually proclaim “results”, which can be kinda vague.
College here is generally synonymous with university there. There are community colleges (two years only) that can be a kind of intermediate stage, or can provide some vocational education (i.e. applied skills).
You’re telling me!
Typically paid employees. It’s usually a part time job, as it requires some degree of special certification. School buses are owned by schools, and supposedly maintained at a higher standard of safety.
Offhand, I’d say that’s rural or lesser used stations in conjunction with Hollywood. Heavy gravel does the job as well or better, and trains are not very heavily used in the US for distance travel, so I suspect the thinking has been that is not worth the expense of installation and maintenance.
I don’t know whether dog-catcher is an elected office anywhere in the US anymore, although I suspect it may be. However, even though I grew up in a small farming community, I never knew this to be an office that was campaigned for.
I think these days there are no dog-catchers per se. There are animal control officers, who are (I think) part of police departments, and as such are simply hired professionals like other police.
Many lawyers here do advertise now, although when I was a kid this was Not Done. But it’s rarely criminal lawyers; mostly it’s ambulance chasers. The medical profession is less clear. Individual doctors don’t usually advertise, but hospitals do incessantly, and certain clinical procedure doctors (such as the guys who do Lasix surgeries) do.
The term shower refers to “shower with gifts.” A baby shower is for a (usually) first time mother (or parents, these days), to give her/them things that are assumed to be already owned in the event of a second child.
As I understand it, universities offer graduate degrees as well as undergrad degrees. Colleges only offer undergrad degrees. There are very good four year colleges. The word college has been watered down in the U.S. ('cause in our egaltarian society EVERYONE needs a college education - we are idiots - if you can’t meet the spec, just lower it) and often includes two year schools and even “technical colleges” where one can learn to be a machinist. But generally, people use the word college to mean “undergrad” and use the words “grad school” to mean, well, grad school. Few people use the words “I’m going to University” (I think I’ve only heard that from people not from around here.)
Pretty much anything to do with home decorating and DIY - ‘latex paint’? ‘spackle’?? ‘siding’??? ‘shingles’??? ‘sheetrock’??? (actually, I know what all of these mean - I think - but that doesn’t stop them causing a jarring disconnect whenever I encounter them)
Loads of TV references - doesn’t matter how well-known your news anchors are over there, I’ve never heard of them.
Any number of TV series’ - [everybody/nobody/somebody] [verbs] [proper noun] - meh. Pretty much any reference to a TV commercial, unless it’s a big international brand like Apple.
Names of restaurant chains (can’t think of any good examples right now)
OK, now I gotta ask – so what do you call these things?
It was years before I realised that “bangs” (as in hair) meant “fringe”. I always assumed it was hair beads or something. I still don’t see why it would be called “bangs”. And I still don’t know what a Twinkie is. I could Google it, but it’s probably more fun not knowing. You can imagine all sorts of rude connotations that way. Or does it already have rude connotations?
How can your American football teams be bought out and move to another city.
Who supports them when they move, surely not the fans of the place they left.
This all seems a bit odd to me, I mean if Manchester City moved to Sheffield …wtf??
US universities have various colleges (for instance, my graduate degree was from the College of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo), although they aren’t as autonomous as the colleges of UK universities. A US college is essentially a university without sub-colleges.
There are also public community colleges, where one receives an Associates Degree after two years. Students can then transfer to a regular four-year college or university.
I really don’t get gun culture here, but its intensity and form tends to vary from place to place. In progressive urban areas, there’s almost no gun culture to speak of. In blue-collar exurban and rural areas, where deer season (the week or two that the state government allows hunters to shoot deer) is practically a holiday, the rugged hunting crowd reigns. Rural areas in the western US is really where you’ll see the gun fetish crowd, and even then it’s not dominant; just more prevalent than in other parts of the country.
The only department store I know of that sells guns is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart started as a discount store chain serving mostly rural areas, so stocking guns was a given. I think other rural-oriented discount store chains, like Alco or Tractor Supply, may also sell guns; I’m not positive, though. Chains that were always suburban/urban oriented, like Target, don’t sell guns. Traditional department stores also don’t sell guns; Sears might have at one time, but places like Macy’s, Dillard’s, Saks, Nordstrom, Lord and Taylor, Bon-Ton, and the like – the US equivalent to David Jones, more or less – have never sold guns.
They’re cheaper than regular transit buses. They’re only driven twice a day for part of the year, and used for occasional field trips, so they’re not engineered for heavy duty service like transit buses may be.
I grew up in a densely populated city, and the school district issued public transit passes to students. The only kids that rode school buses were retarded or handicapped; the “special needs” children. When you hear references to the “short bus,” this is what they’re talking about; the buses used to transport “special” children to school are much shorter than regular school buses, and often equipped with wheelchair lifts.
School districts replace school buses on a regular basis. Old buses are usually purchased by inner-city churches, or transit companies in Mexico and Central America. The passenger buses cruising the streets of Juarez and Guadalajara probably carried teenagers to high school in Shaker Heights or Overland Park a decade or two earlier.
Some schools own their own buses, while others may outsource busing to companies like Laidlaw. Buses are driven by paid part-time employees; often housewives, younger retirees, unskilled women, and so on.
Long-distance railroad passenger cars had varying floor heights. Also, the tracks were used for freight service; freight cars might not be able to clear the platforms. I think.
Fortunately, urban planners aren’t elected. It’s usually county governments where you’ll see elections for positions like coroner and chief engineer. It varies from place to place; generally, there are more elections for minor public officials in New England than in other states. States where many of the original settlers came from New England, such as Ohio, also share that trait. It’s a remnant of the reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th century; instead of appointing cronies into positions, reformers believed it would be best to let citizens do the job.
Individual doctors and dentists generally don’t advertise on TV and the radio, but you may see ads for hospital systems, emergency clinics or drug treatment centers (especially in Southwestern states). Most lawyers that advertise on TV and radio are criminal defense, personal injury and bankruptcy attorneys. They aren’t held in high regard. The amount of lawyer ads you’ll see on TV varies from place to place; in Buffalo, they’re a staple of television advertising, while in some other cities they are far less common. Ads are also more common during the daytime, on lowbrow television shows, when the target market – uneducated, unemployed or injured lower-income people – are most likely to be watching. Some states are placing greater restrictions on advertising by lawyers.
Latex paint = Emulsion paint (I don’t think it actually contains any latex)
Spackle = decorating filler, sometimes ‘Polyfilla’ - a brand-name-turned-generic
Siding = ??? - we don’t really have a lot of this; I suppose it would be called cladding here.
Shingles = roof tiles
Sheetrock = plaster board
Well, according to this, “bangs” as in hair may have come from the notion of chopping the hair “bang off”. It is a funny thing to call them, now that you mention it.
A Twinkie claims to be a yellow sponge cake filled with cream. All I know is that they seem to have a shelf-life of decades. Definitely seen as a low-class kind of snack food.
Is Florida really as messed up as Fark would have the world believe (I mean, New Jersey doesn’t have its own tag) or do they just target the weird 'n wacky news articles from there to create that impression? When I was growing up, Florida was largely considered a place where old people went to live out their remaining days playing lawn darts and bridge – kind of like Valhalla for geriatric white folks. It didn’t strike me as being a place full of nutcases 'til Fark.