ruadh writes:
> I’ve lived in both cities too and I would remind you that the Tube covers about
> a zillion more miles than the Metro does.
Let’s be a little more precise here. The (London) Tube covers 244 miles. The (Washington) Metro covers 103 miles. My experience is that if there’s any noticeable difference between them, it’s because the Washington system was built so much more recently than the London one.
But you are gullible and naive enough to believe that our criminals just happen to be better-armed than those in the rest of the West, and that making it just as easy to pick up a rifle at WalMart as it is to grab a box of diapers has nothing to do with it?
The number of Iraqi citizens who have been killed, injured, or arrested attacking U.S. servicemen in the last three months would comfortably fill, say, a bingo hall. Would that constitute a roomful of Iraqi citizens? And are their actions sufficient proof of their belief that things are worse? Perhaps more importantly, I humbly submit that it would be fairly easy finding half a nation full of Afghan citizens who feel they were better off under a stable theocracy then a toothless (and worsening) democracy. (I will not presume to speak for Afghan women, but I’d imagine that at least half of them are unhappier too).
To be fair, Americans do provide a great deal of disaster relief, but we do it only when disasters actually happen, rather than providing training and equipment to disaster-prone countries to help prepare them for coming crises. In any case, our foreign aid spending as a percentage of GDP, at 0.1% (1998) is about half that of the stingiest EU member states, and a tenth of Denmark’s.
Nope. The Jubilee Line is so named for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee- in 1977.
I’m not sure that is true. Searching imdb for any reasonably common name often shows up numerous actors/actresses with the same name.
From SAG rules (warning: PDF file)
Neurotik: I guessed you probably meant the Jubilee or Metropolitan Line.
Only an idiot would call the London Underground perfect, but as Wendell Wagner hints, parts of it are over 140 years old (although not the JL). There are other problems it has to cope with, not least that recently it went through a period of budgetary cuts under an administration that thought we should all travel by car “like they do in America”. It deservedly has its critics, but there aren’t comparable systems in many other cities and it certainly isn’t a typical example for comparison. Public transportation systems are more common in European cities than in the USA, but where they exist there’s no reason why a recently-built metro shouldn’t be good anywhere.
BTW, the guy in charge of the Tube now is Bob Kiley, who got a lot of credit for his work on the NYC Subway (which had been severely criticised before), so maybe it will improve soon.
LolaCocaCola: re the “God Bless” thing, you seem to have a hard time telling the difference between an observation and a criticism. Nobody, or at least no foreigners here, have said it’s a problem for US politicians to invoke the almighty, just that is doesn’t seem to happen in other places. The OP was asking for differences people have noticed, that’s all.
I’d be surprised if C. Thomas Howell, F. Lee Bailey, L. Ron Hubbard and the rest use(d) their first initials in everyday conversation, but I can’t easily think of other nationalities who use them even in print. FWIW I have personally known several people being called by their middle names (including my dad), but on forms etc. they have either written their names in full or used both initials. Actors typically change their names altogether over here.
Then why does Jervise get so upset when I say it? I never claimed it was never used in a political context - only that it doesn’t happen as frequently as Jervise thinks.
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Define “not unusual”. Twice a year? Once a day? Dude, I’ve lived in this country 40 years and you seem to have heard it more often than I have. Hence my belief that foreigners have a distorted idea of how often it occurs.
LoL. Very true, but I 'm having a ball picturing their faces turning red every time I refuse to affirm their prejudices.
LoL. Everton, I’m not sure you can either. This sporadic flame fight consists of Europeans saying they find it weird that Americans say “God Bless America”, Americans saying that it doesn’t happen all that often and Europeans getting upset because that doesn’t agree with their perceptions.
If scr4, et. al., accepted that we were just offering observations, why do they keep attacking with such words as “ridiculous”, “tiring”, and (my personal favorite) “prevarication”?
You’ve been reading a different thread, porkchop_d_clown. You need to kick that straw man habit too.
I just checked all the State of the Union addresses in the last 20 years, as well as the 5 speeches listed on whitehouse.gov top page. Every single one of them contains the phrase “Got bless America” or a close variant. I think that counts as “not unusual.”
I used the word “tiring” because it is tiring that people deny so forcefully what is to me an obvious fact.
Sorry, that last sentence wasn’t appropriate for GQ, I take it back.
But I do stand by my observations. I guess it just comes down to the semantics of what one considers “common” or “not unusual.” My impression is that foreigners aren’t used to the casual use of the phrase and find it memorable.
I think the discrepancy in perceptions of the frequency of use of “God Bless America” can be tied to the idea that it doesn’t really mean all that much to Americans. If, in fact, it is used as frequently as Europeans believe, I think it stands out more to them because they come from an environment where similar sentiments aren’t used as much. We Americans hear it enough that it doesn’t really have much of a meaning behind it, so we don’t notice it. Isn’t it really just a political thing anyways?
SCR4! What exactly have I denied? Show me where I said that it doesn’t happen. Then, perhaps you will understand why I’m so bemused at your reaction.
All I have done is stated a simple fact: what you see and read on the web isn’t representative of our actual every day lives. What seems to you to be a common occurrence is not. And, no, I don’t think the state of the union is typical of every day life!
What I find more interesting is that you find it all so upsetting. Given that America was founded on the idea of religious freedom, do you really think we’d prevent a politician from expressing his religious beliefs? I mean, it’s not like we’re France, is it?
I’m sorry, Everton. Are you saying that Jervise and Sc4 didn’t use those words in their posts? Perhaps you want to go back over the thread again.
These are probably an accurate observations. Plus there’s the generally relaxed attitude Americans have to political speech in general. In particular, I wonder how many Americans have read the last 20 State of the Union addresses the way sc4 just did. 
If we’re talkin’ 'bout Americanisms here–
This one may not be important enough to start a Great Debate( like the World Series , or the eating-utensil profundities)
– but its a pretty good candidate for the Most Purely American Americanism(i.e. it is done nowhere else in the Universe, except for USA):
WRITING THE DATE ASS-BACKWARDS
Basic logic says you do things by size,starting from small to medium to large–so why not write the date in that order–day,month,year. ? What Darwinian evolutionary advantage is bequeathed to your offspring by writing the month first?
First, I tend to write year-month-day for my own use, because I tend to sort things and I want my files to sort in correct time order. It drives me nuts to look at a hard disk folder full of business letters and see that all the January letters are grouped together, but the letters from 2003 are scattered across the folder.
But I think I’m the only person I know who does that.
In defense of the normal American habit, though - how do you say the date? Americans tend to say “January First” and “March 23rd” and in formal writing, they spell it out that way: “The president gave a speech on June 15th, 2004”… We do occasionally write “15th of June, 2004” but (IMHO) that’s an archaic form only used in legal documents: “I, the undersigned to hereby agree to repay the debt by the 15th of June, 2004.”
So, to sum up, writing the date as 6/15/04 is simply short hand for the way we speak it.
Because in spoken speech (at least here in the States), no one uses the day, month, year arrangment you propose. If I’m going on a vacation and want to tell people when I’m leaving, I tell my friends I’m leaving on August 12th, 2004, not the 12th of August, 2004. We write the date so it corresponds to the pattern used in spoken speech - 8/12/2004. There’s nothing illogical about it.
That’s plainly untrue.
There mightn’t even be an argument but for the fact that you’ve repeatedly distorted Jervoise’s point of view. You’re still doing it now, even though it’s been clearly explained to you more than once, and you are basing your argument on what his position “seems” to be to you rather than what it really is. So instead of amusing yourself picturing people getting red in the face, surely it would make more sense to understand what they’re saying, not inventing their arguments for them?
Jervoise’s first contribution to this thread (repeated more than once since) was not that ordinary Americans frequently say “God Bless America” in everyday speech, or even that public figures are doing it very frequently. First he said that the fact that it’s done by politicians at all is an American peculiarity, because that just isn’t done elsewhere outside of Muslim countries. For some reason you’ve chosen to ignore that.
Later he used cites to show cases of American politicians and others making public affirmations of their faith more frequently than he would have expected elsewhere. That’s all. If you could demonstrate that such references to God are just as common on other western countries then that would be a reasonable counter response, but instead you said that cites are irrelevant and (incorrectly) that they must’ve come from misleading foreign media sources.
It doesn’t matter that you’ve admitted Americans do say “God Bless America”, the point is about a comparison between American usage and foreign usage, and nothing you’ve said addresses that.
I don’t see where anyone (apart from one or two Americans) have raised objections to God being referenced in Congress, and nobody is upset about it.
I recall from another thread that Jervoise has visited your country and so has first-hand experience to go on. How frequently, in your experience, do foreign politicians make reference to God in public speeches, and how often is God referred to outside of the religious context?
What date is Independence Day again?
FWIW, there was another GQ about this recently and it transpired that various forms appear in everyday speech among English speakers, with the military having their own peculiarities.