The GirlAlive Blog

I'm a little anal-retentive about geography.  I minored (almost a second major) in geography in college.  I have learned that the British are mildly retarded when it comes to geography outside their little island.  Especially regarding the United States.  I'm pretty sure they don't teach any geography in schools here outside of Europe and a few select Commonwealth countries.  

I saw an episode of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" where they asked a man "Which of these US states is located on the East Coast?" with choices of California, Oregon, Washington or Maryland.  He didn't know.  He asked the audience.  Less than 35% of the audience got it right.  30% of them thought California was on the East Coast.

Last night I was watching the Discovery Channel show "Ink Wars".  The Discovery Channel re-narrates all American shows with a British narrator, so they can say patronizing things about our measurement system.  This British narrator was talking about the Seattle tattoo convention on the "Eastern Seaboard of the United States."  He said that at least 3 times.  They must have moved Seattle in the last couple of years because when I lived there it was on the West coast.  (And they weren't talking about a different Seattle because they wouldn't stop showing the Space Needle.)

Maybe British schools teach that there is a West Pole in the middle of the Atlantic, and coasts closest to that pole are west coasts and the coasts furthest away are east.  Or maybe they're all dumbasses.

For the benefit of the British, a few corrections for errors I've heard while I've lived here:

The "zip code for New York" is not NY.  That is the state abbreviation.  Zip codes are 9-digit hyphenated numbers, and there are several hundred thousand of them in New York.  

Washington is not the capitol of the United States.  Washington is a state on the West Coast.  The capitol of the United States is Washington D.C.  The D.C. stands for District of Columbia.  The District of Columbia (or "D.C.") is our capitol, and the Washington part is just a modifier.

You cannot refer to a city as, for instance, "Chicago, America" or "Chicago, USA".  It is "Chicago, Illinois."  There could be as many as 50 different Chicagos in the US.  You must use the state name in order to tell them apart properly.  Do you prefer us to call it "Edinburgh, Scotland" or "Edinburgh, UK"?  It's the same deal.

Iowa, Idaho, and Ohio are 3 different places.  They don't even border each other.  Ohio is on the Great Lakes.  Iowa is in the middle of the country on the Mississippi.  Idaho is in the Northern Rocky Mountains.  You get annoyed when Americans get England and Scotland mixed up.  They at least border each other.  Iowa, Idaho and Ohio aren't even close.

The country is called "the US" or "the States" or "the United States" or "the United States of America".  It is not "America".   "America" is a pair of continents, not a country.  The proper name of the country is "The United States", and the "of America" is only a modifier to distinguish it from any other countries made of a group of states, such as Mexico or the former Soviet Union.   Canadians are from North America.  Mexicans are from North America.  Uruguayans are from South America.  You may identify me as American because I am also from North America.  But the country I am from is the United States.

I always hear statistics about how 18-year-olds in the US can't find Canada on a map.  I'm pretty sure 18-year-olds in the UK would have trouble figuring out which side of the paper the map was printed on.

Alana