People here use the worst language I’ve ever heard. They’re relatively well-mannered, I guess, in that they’ll grunt happily when you hold a door, but something got lost in the language stakes. The four year-olds use appalling swearwords, and I’m hardly a sheltered soul myself, but this is like acid on the ears. Their parents use it to them, so I suppose really it’s just a local vernacular. Still nasty though.
Having said that I’ve never had any trouble myself. This is a terribly deprived area in many ways, and certainly not a safe one, but I’ve found it pretty easy to call it home quickly.
Orlando’s hit-or-miss. Considering the dominance of tourism and its location at the fringes of the South, politeness would seem to be the order of the day. Still, the city seems to have more than its fair share of griff rednecks, Lawnguylund transplants, assertive drivers, and indifferent service and retail workers. I’d give it a 5 on the politeness meter.
Buffalo, the “City of Good Neighbors” – leaning towards the polite side, in a small town way, yet extremely insular. St. Louis has the high school attendance fetish; in Buffalo, it’s there to some extent (Hutch Tech!), but the big thing is ethnicity. If someone asks “So, what are ya’?”, and they will, they’re not inquiring about your job. Working-class Buffalonians are very friendly towards outsiders, but if you’re a resident and your great grandparents took a different boat to the New World than their great grandparents, you might have problems. On the politeness scale, a 6.
Baltimore is extremely rude. As rude, if not ruder, than New York, based on my experiance. For instance, if you happen to be crossing an intersection and the light changes while you are five feet from the curb, cars immediately start honking and and yelling “Fuck you, cunt!” (this actually happened to me last night). Drivers will aim for pedestrians. Last night my friends and I went to The Block (the sex-store, strip club, peep show section of Baltimore Street) to buy cigarettes. We ended up on a store that had an arcade. While I was playing some shoot-em-up game, a fight broke out over another game and someone pulled a knife and they had to hustled outside.
About three months ago, I had parked on a relatively crappy street about three blocks down from my friend’s house. Upon returning to my car, I started to back away and the guy next to me opened his door, which knocked into my side mirror. Here is a sample of our conversation:
“Fucking bitch! Damn near took my leg off!”
“What the fuck! Try looking before you open your door, assfuck!”
“Bitch…If I get a dent…”
“Then what? It’s YOUR fault! YOU opened your door! I better not have a fucking dent!”
Another time, on another seedy street, I came upon two men trying to break our my rear window and pop the lock. I just said something along the lines of, “I called the cops, assholes” and they ran away screaming bitch and cunt.
I think people here have manners, but those people don’t last very long and move to the suburbs.
Hm, we seem to have run the gamut from amazingly polite and considerate to downright dangerous (which surpasses rude by so far I don’t even know if it belongs on the same scale).
I have to agree with delphica in that I think New York gets a worse rap for being rude than it really deserves. I used to date a guy that lived there, and I never found it to be overly rude. Well, except for the time we were in a taxi and the driver stopped over the crosswalk and a jogger thumped the side of the car because he had to go around to cross the street. The driver jumped out and started screaming at the jogger in Arabic. If Arabic has colorful swear words, I’m sure he said them all.
I think the rudest place I’ve ever been was San Francisco. It was rude in a passive-aggressive way, mostly - except for the bike messenger guy who swore at me because I got in his way when I was crossing the street, I was just mostly invisible to everyone else. It was hard to get store clerks to notice you, and if you actually wanted to buy something, the transaction was conducted with almost zero eye contact and no conversation at all. It was actually rather creepy.
Then there’s Boston, which I only visited for a week, but the favorite sport seems to be trying to mow pedestrians down in the crosswalks. I learned to be VERY careful trying to cross the street there (have you noticed yet that crosswalks seem to be a common theme here?).
I work in a university town, and everyone here seems to be able to deal with the issues of pedestrians and crosswalks pretty gracefully for the most part. Even the students are well-groomed and typically quite polite. People greet the bus drivers and thank them for letting them off at their stops. If someone falls asleep waiting for the light to change at an intersection, others drive around them when the light turns green rather than honk. Much like the Canadian folks have mentioned in this thread, if YOU bump into someone, the other person apologizes!
But TV’s story is the best! Maybe I’ll retire there!