[Coco] Talk Funny

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 07:45 AM 12/23/03 -0600, Frank Swygert wrote:
>Everyone isn't so friendly in the South. Most southern cities are 
>definitely more friendly than places like NYC

Of course, as a born & bred northerner, I feel exactly the opposite. New
York is always the friendliest American city to me (San Francisco a close
second), but I felt like everyone in the South was suspicious of visitors,
always wanting to know what I was doing. The region is also much more
militarized than I'm comfortable with. I feel more at home in Prague or
Amsterdam or Paris than I do in Atlanta or Dallas or New Orleans!

I've been living in the country for 26 years now (in Vermont), so it isn't
cities themselves that are the problem. I think it's just regional taste.
California "let's do lunch" insincerity and loose schedules and hug-talk
gives me the queasies. And those endless midwestern windbag stories --
omigawd, get to the point! I'm always interrupting when I have midwestern
composers on my radio show, or we'd never get more than two questions into
two hours. Southern talk? I lose track of the beginning of a sentence by
the time a deep southerner gets to the end of it -- and what *is* it about
all that polite chatter? Do they really think I care? Okay, okay... :)

On the other hand, I know I speak too quickly and angularly for the
southern ear, because I've been told so. And the northern 'leave you be'
hospitality that I cherish is perceived as coldness from those visiting
from the slap-your-back west. And our brief few-syllable, culture-dependent
tales must appear as pointless to the midwestern flatlander. Heck, the
longest Vermont story I know can be told in about two minutes, and that's
with embellishment.

As for drivers, there are two rules in Vermont: You must drive under the
speed limit on the interstate, and drive over it on the backroads. In other
words, there's just one speed limit here -- 60mph.

>The real traffic problem on the US interstates is simply that we don't 
>know how to drive (yep, I'm guilty on occasion too!). In Germany the 
>Autobahn works so well with unlimited speeds (only in rural areas) 
>because people are more serious about driving. No one drives in the left 
>lane unless they are genuinely going around someone.

I lived in Germany and the Netherlands for a while, and was just driving up
the western part of Germany last year (from Stuttgart), and I think that
may have changed. The driving is more careless and less precise than it was
even when I first lived there in 1991. And driving near the cities (the
Wiesbaden-Cologne corridor or the Paris Peripherique) is a nightmare that
would make American drivers crave LA traffic.

Dennis



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