The British end-of-year discos don’t seem to have the same cultural significance as the Prom does in (north) America, though. There, it seems to be a rite of passage, a milestone-in-your-life sort of thing, with associated angst about who, if anyone accompanies you to the Prom.
Thereby disproving the theory that NYC has everything. Go fifty miles north and you’ll find that Orange and Dutchess counties have sizable Mexican populations and you can get great authentic Mexican food quite readily.
It does? Yay! I’m now a tough guy because I survived 4 years in Deptford!
The end of year Formal is the equivalent here.
I’d like to be able to say that we don’t have these, but alas. My niece had one last year.
Yes, we have them.
Yes, we have them.
Cheddar Cheese, Track Built Homes (Drywall), Shopping as Culture, Billboards, eating with hands; cutting with right hand, then switching fork to right hand; lack of Universal Health Care, Cotton Candy, the Banjo, large Sub-Urban areas void of a central downtown, strip malls, Mobile Homes (trailors, not RV’s), Box Spring and Mattress Combinations (vs platform beds), 24-hour shopping, and really funny comedians (Richard Pryor, Robin Williams).
Uh . . . no.
Are you thinking of “American cheese”? I hope to Og we haven’t been exporting that vile substance, which can’t even properly be called cheese. More likely, some byproduct of the plastics industry.
And how about national flags? In the U.S. you see flags everywhere, all different sizes, materials and circumstances, even on the front of private homes. I haven’t seen this anywhere else.
The Great Gatsby is another classic American novel that British kids read in school - perfect length for studying in an English lit class. If you study English for your A-levels, when you are 16-17 years old, you’ll start to read TS Eliot for poetry - I think he’s seen as a bit difficult for younger students. Most British school kids will have read Macavity the mystery cat though.
It’s exactly the same drink, only served a few degrees colder. I can’t say I really notice much difference, to be honest.
I dislike truly ice-cold drinks, anyway. They make my whole palate ache.
You see a few groups of kids with a Guy every year in Wigan.
Is he? I had Eliot at 14—15, and loved it: Prufrock, The Wasteland, all that. Certainly [del]better[/del] more to my taste than DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.
Of course, that was in the 70s, when we had proper “O” levels [lawn, kids etc]. For “A” levels we moved on to Swift and Chaucer.
I grew up in the Bay Area, and the husband of one of my mom’s good friends was a hunter. He’d go hunting (in the Sierras?) every hunting season (whenever that is) and bring back deer.
In my parents’ social circle this was regarded with some amount of horror. Everyone liked the guy, but…hunting? We aren’t rednecks! This is the Bay Area! Meat should come in packages from Whole Foods (or possibly Trader Joe’s)!
Missed the edit window, sorry.
Clearly you have not been to Turkey, then. I’d actually put the Turks ahead of the US for displays of patriotism for their extreme devotion to Ataturk. His picture is EVERYWHERE.
You’re probably thinking of:
• “American cheese food” (e.g., Kraft Singles) (which contains as little as 51% cheese) or
• “American cheese product” (e.g., Kraft Velveeta) (which contains less than 51% cheese).
“American cheese” (e.g., Kraft Deluxe American) contains only cheese and emulsifying salts, no fillers. McDonald’s uses sharp American cheese on its sandwiches.
You do know that more than 90% of maple syrup comes from outside of the United States, right?
Up until this moment, I thought TS Eliot was British. :o
Actually, in some ways i think it’s perfectly reasonable to classify Eliot as British, for the purposes of literary categories. He moved to England and became a citizen, and his classicism as well as his royalist Anglophilia infused much of his work. This is not to deny his American origins, nor to deny that American styles and ways of thinking are entirely absent inhis work. But if i saw a copy of Eliot in a British classroom, i certainly wouldn’t consider it indicative of a bent towards American literature.
Well, to be fair, he lived here from the age of 25, and for nearly half of his life he was British.
Strictly speaking, I’m not sure that he counts as American literature – maybe we’ll call it a draw.
True (is it really that high? I thought it would be more like 75%), but more Americans associate Maple Syrup with Vermont than Canada, I’d wager. Even when I’m not in VT, almost all the bottles of maple syrup I see say “Vermont Maple Syrup.” Sometimes NH has “New Hampshire Maple Syrup,” and parts of northern NY say “Adirondack Maple Syrup,” but I don’t recall seeing “Canadian Maple Syrup” much down here.
Plus, the thread has turned more into a whole North American cultural things thread than just the US.
I wonder if that’s for import reasons–there’s no point importing maple syrup from Canada, if the US produces its own. I imagine that’s the reason I’ve never seen any maple syrup up here from the US; the only stuff available is our own, produced in Ontario and Quebec.
Interestingly, when I’ve been in food shops and supermarkets in the UK and Australia, the only genuine maple syrup I saw in those places was both Canadian and quite expensive. I’ve never seen American maple syrup outside of the US. Of course, it might well be in those countries (and others), just not in the shops I was in.
American maple syrup would be even more expensive, subject to tariffs that products from British Commonwealth countries are not.