Despite the nation’s hastening descent into the abyss of white supremacist totalitarian fascism, I mostly love living in the United States. My life here is, all things considered, pretty great. I am very fortunate indeed. But there are some things that bother me every single damn day. It’s exhausting living with all of them, so I’ve noted down a handful of my woes in an attempt to purge my mind of the constant raging confusion. Here they are, in no particular order:
When swimming lengths in a pool, why do Americans refer to them as laps? They are not laps. Laps would mean swimming around the pool, like NASCAR drivers or middle-distance runners on tracks. Pools even have lanes demarcating where one should swim, to the other end and back, in straight lines. It’s definitely not a lap pool; if it were, there would be no ropes between the lanes making sure everyone using it has to swim lengths.
Writing the date. This makes literally no sense. The slashes or periods either divide or they do something else. In nearly the entire rest of the world, the system is day [of the] month [of the] year. Here, though, it’s month [in which this is the] day [of the] year. How does it make sense to assign two different purposes to the same punctuation mark in the same context? It’s time to be consistent and logical and not demand of the slash or the period any crazy feats of contortion or contradiction.
Soccer, the world’s most popular sport, is actually called football. See, for instance, FIFA – the Fédération International de Football Association, the world’s leading authority on football. Furthermore, as British jazz legend, Django Bates, notes in the song “Football” on his 2004 album You Live and Learn (Apparently), “you kick the ball with your foot; that’s why they call it football”.
Why are there no manual transmission cars? I know, I know, I could buy one if I could afford a brand-new special order with a six-month lead time and a massive premium for the privilege of such a specialized boutique request. But what the hell happened to any kind of autonomy as a driver? It’s so bloody boring driving an automatic. I was annoyed enough when all passenger cars started coming with power steering as the default (I can’t feel the road anymore), but to be stripped of my remaining decision-making power as a motorist is as dehumanizing as the stupid back-up camera (and why y’all can’t just call it “reversing”, I don’t know). I get to disengage almost entirely from the driving process now, which surely can’t make me or anyone else any safer.
Why are people here so frequently obsessed with believing they live in the greatest country on earth, often without having visited any others? Leaving aside the very many reasons why the USA isn’t the greatest country on earth (the bail system, gun deaths, incarceration rates, absence of statutory maternity leave or basic health care, the coffee at Dunkin), who cares? I’m pretty sure no one outside of the USA even knows there’s a competition. Except maybe Putin. Instead of constantly claiming to have already won an imaginary contest no one else is taking part in, could we all just, for a moment, relax?
Traffic lights. Two problems: 1) they dangle precariously over the middle of intersections; 2) they are commonly 30 feet in the air. The first time I drove in the US, in 2003, I drove right up to a red light, only to find I was in the centre of a four-way intersection. Genius. Stop signs and stop lines here are, sensibly, where you have to actually stop. In Europe, so are the traffic lights. It’s potty to put them anywhere else. And every time I am unfortunate enough to be in the front of a queue (yes, queue) at traffic lights, I have to basically break my neck even to see the lights. Why not put them closer to eye level? I am told it’s because of truck drivers. Well guess what, other countries have lorries (uh huh) as well, and their drivers either peer slightly downwards to view the lights or there are additional, higher lights to enable them to look only straight ahead. My neck hurts.
Election campaign funding. In the 22 years I lived as a registered voter in the UK, no one ever asked me for a political donation, even during the brief time I was a member of the Labour Party. I gave the Joe Biden campaign a handful of dollars a month or two ago, and I now receive at least half a dozen requests every day via text message and email from his campaign or another Democratic senator. It’s all the more annoying because Biden is the most vanilla of candidates. There’s precious little about him to get behind, but I agree with Noam Chomsky’s assessment of the Republican party as the most dangerous organization on the planet for human life, and would happily see almost anyone bar Trump in that office. Also, as a mere permanent resident, I can’t even vote.
Check, check and check (check, tick and cheque). There is a very simple way to distinguish between these three items. A check is a check. It’s what you do when you look at something to make sure everything is hopefully ok. A tick is the thing that goes in a box to say you agree with the terms and conditions or that the student got the answer generally right. A cheque is a paper slip that people in the rest of the world stopped using in the late 1980s as a form of payment for goods or services.
Why does sliced bread come in two bags? And why is one them totally shit? The outer bag functions perfectly well, but the inner one splits from the moment it’s delicately prized open until I reach the final few slices and have to disentangle them from noisy shreds of crispy, redundant extra bag. WTF.
Why does water always come with pounds of ice? Usually when drinking water, as opposed to coffee or wine, I’m thirsty or dehydrated or both. I want to neck a pint or two of Adam’s ale there and then. But the ice reduces the water content by about 50%, makes the water that is there about 80% harder to get into my mouth past the sodding ice, and makes the water so cold it’s impossible to get much down my throat or even past my teeth without wincing and needing a break. And on the rare occasions there is no ice actually in the water, it’s served in a bottle so bloody cold that I still can’t drink the damn stuff without freezing my esophagus every few gulps.
Related, advertisers large and small like to lure drinkers with the promise of ice-cold beer – nary a mention of the flavour. I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the temperature of my beverage if it tastes good. If it’s cold and crap, it’s still crap. A tasty beer at room temperature is still tasty and refreshing. And I can drink it faster. Win-win. People in many hot countries drink recently boiled tea to stay cool, because cold drinks make your body warmer anyway.
In restaurants, I want to be left alone. A server should serve, not hustle and hover, especially when there’s a dozen empty tables. Why whisk away my plate the moment I rest my cutlery on it? Why bring the check the second I put down my dessert spoon, or, worse, while my friends and I are still eating?! In the UK I could really enjoy a meal out, often spending upwards of two or three hours at a table, chatting with friends, occasionally ordering another drink, and not being harassed by hawkish wait staff.
Finally (for now), it is time for the US to adopt regular paper sizes. A4 is the international norm, not “American Letter”, and it’s way, way better for making aeroplanes (yeah, aero-planes).
PS Also, you all know the melody for “My Country, ‘tis of Thee” is the tune of the English national anthem, right? Ok, just checking.