I’ve always attributed the “rude northerner” perception to a difference in expectations. For Northerners, chattiness with strangers is unnecessary (and sometimes unwelcome depending on the situation, e.g., public transit). I don’t expect strangers to smile at me or say hello.
If you come to the Northeast from a region where smiles, hellos and small talk with strangers is the norm, then you might perceive the Northeast as rude. But it isn’t rude, it’s normal.
I find situations where a stranger is overly chatty/“friendly” to be unnerving. If I were in the mid-west or the south I would chalk it up to being my problem. Up here in the cold north, I lump them with the crazy dude on the bus.
I rather like for people to leave me the hell alone, too, and don’t have much problem here. Tennessee relatives teased Dad that Arkansas wasn’t in the South, and he responded that "Tennessee is about as close to Mason Dixon’s line as you can get and still be South of it.
New Hampshire is lovely, by the way. Mrs. Plant v.2.0 and I decided that NH and AR would look very much alike if you switched the granite to shale and added pine trees.
Yep, I once visited Hank William’s childhood home in Georgiana, AL. The lady at the door was all smiles: “Well, hey! Welcome to the Hank Williams Museum! Now, where are y’all from?”
“Atlanta.”
“Oh.”
Wouldn’t even look at us after that. We might as well have said New York. Or Tehran. And I’m as Southern as can be.
When I was 14 I went on Outward Bound in the mountains of NC with a bunch of folks from across the east coast. I remember us backpacking down a rural road at one point, and a pickup truck drove by. I raised my hand in a wave, and the driver waved back.
A girl from Poughkeepsie turned to me in astonishment and asked, “You KNOW him?!”
The only places I’ve been treated rudely for no particular reason are MA (Boston in particular) and in the Southwest. Moab must have the highest asshole-per-capita rating of anywhere else in the country, but it seems the sun has baked the fun out of a lot of folks down in that four corner neck of the woods. I watched a customer and a cashier get into a shouting match in a grocery store in Moab, and this is a town that relies on tourist trade to survive. It’s not my nature to be passive when someone is acting like a dick, so there were some startled looks when I responded to rudeness with “Are we having a problem of some sort, or are you this unpleasant to everybody?”
