Nope, Germans in particular use their thumb to indicate “one”. My dad told me this when I was a kid. He was in Germany for a conference, and was trying to figure out why the bartender kept bringing him two beers when he kept asking for one. Someone finally clued him in that the index finger was for two in Germany.
As I recall the movie, a German would indicate 3 with the thumb, index, and middle fingers. Whereas an American would use index, middle, and ring.
That matches what I’ve seen during the Tour de France. When a rider is preparing to start a time trial stage, there’s an official counting down the last five seconds before the rider can start, and he uses his fingers to display the count. 5, 4, 2, and 1 are just as I would signal them, but 3 is with the thumb, index, and middle. It seems rather awkward to me to extend your thumb on 5, retract it on 4, extend again on 3, then retract again on 2. But it seems to work for them.
I’m not sure. There is a fairly short window where you can have a completely accentless French yet no actual memory or knowledge of French culture
My paternal grandma was the child of an Italian couple who immigrated in 1913. She had a distinctly Italian accent and could speak it flawlessly as far as I could tell.
But if she left young enough to have no memory of iItaly or Italian culture directly, to a native Italian from Italy would she have sounded american?
Genuine question, I know lots of “0.5 gen” (i.e. came to America as a young child) immigrants who speak English with an American accent, and also (as far as I know) a second language flawlessly. But would an actual native of their home country detect an accent when they speak the language?
She was born in the US.
That is legitimately a good question. I suspect that there are so many regional accents in European countries that a first-generation American returning to their parents’ country might pass for “they’re not from around here, but they might be from up north” or something like that, but that’s just speculation.
Quebec … though there is a bit of a dialect difference - sort of like the difference between say Boston and New York [say Brooklyn] He simply could have been from a French colony that ended up in Paris from the Asian colonies. A Vietnmese born and raised French officials kids would be fluent in French but probably never saw a pissoire ‘in the wild’
Generally true, but I know from experience there must be some regional or cultural variation (because into early elementary school in Texas, coming from southeastern Michigan, I would indicate 3 the “German” way—is it German, or is it continental?).
It’s perfectly plausible for a spy to be caught via some subtle cultural nuance. Less so for a downed airman trying to make it back to the friendly side of the front lines. Spies are trained in all of the obvious ways to fit in (speaking the language, clothing styles, obvious cultural differences, etc.), so if they’re caught, it’ll be from something subtle enough for their trainers to miss (like, say, learning too many verses of the nation’s national anthem).
A downed airman, though, wouldn’t be trained in any of that.
That’s also one of the plot points about that bar scene in Inglourious Basterds: The English spy spoke flawless German, but with no accent that any of the native speakers in the bar could place. That set off the suspicions of the SS officer.
They managed to bull through that (whew! what a relief!) and then blew it woth English finger counting instead of German (rats, almost pulled it off!).
Good question. It’s done that way in Inglorious Basterds, which is hardly an authoritative source, and TdF time trials. Beyond those two occasions I couldn’t tell you how widespread it is.
If only there was a place to get answers to questions like that.
It’s entirely possible that the character in the story I read was a spy and not just some unlucky paratrooper. As I said in the OP, I only vaguely remember the story, which is why I was hoping that describing it might ring a bell with someone.
I recall a story about the underground helping airmen escape after they parachuted. (Dutch? French?) One point they made was that when eating in public, Americans would switch their fork to the right hand for some eating, while Europeans never did.
There’s a possibly-apocryphal tale in Taiwan about an undercover police officer who was embedded in a gang/mafia as his assignment. What blew his cover was when he went to a movie theater with the gangsters to see a film together, and when the ticket-selling cashier asked him, “Any particular discount benefits to claim?” the cop reflexively said, by habit, “Yes, the police discount please.”
He did it that way, but it’s not clear to me if he understood that, that way round , it’s the British equivalent of the US middle finger.
Didn’t somebody clue him in fairly early on about the F*-u significance, and he reversed it thereafter?
Not a question I can answer.
All I know is the famous pic. I assumed he was culturally clueful about the country he was leading at the time and so his gesture was typical of his countrymen. Seems I was wrong in that assumption.
I think that might have been an Encyclopedia Brown mystery.
ISTR that my parents told me they thought he knew fine well the vulgar significance and meant it as a kind of unspoken in-joke, along the lines of “The V-sign really means ‘Cobblers to Hitler’ but we’ll officially claim to be high-minded”.
Footnote: my father had been taken POW on Crete before the V campaign started and therefore knew nothing about it. He told me that, when his party of released POWs got back to the UK, and were being transported by the lorry-load to their reception centre, they couldn’t believe how many passers-by - especially women - were greeting them with the V-sign: to which they responded enthusiastically in kind. Of course he might have been exaggerating.
I was a Sea Cadet in high school and served in the Navy from 1986 - 1992, so I did a lot of those correspondence courses. I’m not at all familiar with the anecdote, but it may have been in one of the air crew related courses and not the one for Seaman (that one was primarily about life aboard ship and survival at sea).
As for the anecdote itself it sounds like pure made-up bullshit. There was a lot of that in the correspondence courses of the era.