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Netizen Wonders “What Is An American Thing But Americans Think Everyone Outside Of America Does It?”, Gets 30 Responses
"We're all living in America," once sang the cult German rock band Rammstein, implying that the entire modern world is in fact Pax Americana, and that it is incredible to imagine a contemporary person who is not involved in American culture and customs in any way.
"We're all living in America" - that is, even the Japanese, far from Christianity, celebrate Christmas at KFC, with Colonel Sanders as Santa. "We're all living in America" - and every newly elected US President becomes TIME Person of the Year simply by the fact of being elected. "We're all living in America" - and the inflation rate in most countries of the world is unofficially measured by the Big Mac index.
The main country of the world unconsciously dictates its preferences to this planet, but it also plays in the opposite direction. It often happens, when Americans travel abroad for the first time, they are massively surprised - it turns out that there is a huge world beyond the stars and stripes, and its inhabitants not only don't follow American traditions, but even consider then weird and sometimes bizarre.
Do you want a good example? Well, not exactly perfect, since Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen announced their impending divorce, but still - over the past ten years or so, Americans have gotten used to thinking of Gisele as "the wife of the great Brady", and almost the rest of the world, if any had an idea about the football GOAT, knew him only as "the husband of the incomparable Bundchen".
And so, a few days ago, a thread appeared in the AskReddit community, the author of which asked the question: "What is an American thing but Americans think everyone outside of America does it?" As of today, there are already over 22.4K upvotes and around 27.7K various comments in the thread, written by both Americans and representatives of other countries living or ever having lived in the USA.
Bored Panda has put together a special selection for you with the most interesting, unexpected and just incredibly popular comments from the original thread, so please feel free to scroll this list to the very end, mark the submissions you enjoy best and don't forget to leave comments in case you have something to add. After all, "we're all living in America"...
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no issue with violence shown to kids in tv and movies, while simultaneously losing your s**t if someone flashes a breast at any time
Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It's alarming to me how many Americans I've met who think all countries do their own version of the pledge. It is a uniquely American thing.
As a very anti-nationalist guy, I can't describe how creepy and dystopian the "pledge" is to me.
UK here, the price you see in a shop is the price you actually pay
Why do people keep stating that different states have different taxes?? Every country has different taxes and VAT rates on different products and it’s still easy for them to put the total price against the individual product. Laziness of shop owners at pricing just means more work for them at sale end.
Flags on everything always seemed weird to me, flags on their houses, flags on their cars, flags at the beach, flags f**ken everywhere.
American college culture is the weirdest s**t on earth.
Frats, sororities, all of it.
Literally no other country is like that, anywhere.
We may not have frats and sororities in the UK/EU, but we certainly have the drinking and parties. xP (eg: Freshers Week in the UK, or Russefeiring in Norway, etc)
The sheer amount of ad breaks when watching a tv show. In the US, there seems to be one every 10 mins, but here in the UK, you get a break halfway through a show and then in between shows and that's it.
Circumcision. It is actually not very common outside North America & Africa.
Having garbage disposal unit installed under kitchen sink.
Fahrenheit
Once, the weather app on my phone had its settings changed to farenheit by my brother without me knowing so i ended up freaking out when i saw that the forecast for tomorrow would be 75 degrees
Having the waiter take your credit card at a restaurant. Most other countries bring the machine to you so you can pay at the table and at least reduce the risk of having your credit card information stolen...
Files for bankruptcy for medical bills...
Having public bathroom stall doors that do NOT go all the way to the floor.
The over the top customer service attitude.
On a trip abroad my wife thought that she upset the waiter somehow because he was generally neutral in his interaction.
It was generally neutral because it was a generally neutral interaction. No need for that customer service attitude!
So on this one, the US is being criticized because service workers are friendly? 🤔
Identify as the nationality of their great grandparents.
It’s the melting pot idea. TBH, there’s nothing wrong with being proud of your background, but we’re all still Americans—-no matter how many generations have passed since our forebears got off the boat. Or the plane.
No joke I knew a girl who really thought every country lit fireworks on the 4th of July.
The first amendment. I just howled with laughter when some Canadian convoy protestor claimed he had first amendment rights, when the first amendment in the Canadian constitution actually provided for the government of Manitoba.
Many people forget that rights come with responsibilities, and have reasonable limits. Yes, you have the right to free speech, but if you incite violence with it, you have to pay the consequences of doing so. The worse the violence, the heavier the consequences. Most of us understand that, but the loud, rude minority seem to get more attention, and end up being the false and unfair stereotype of all of us.
Born and raised in the US (Massachusetts). When I went to Australia, I automatically assumed that the waiter would bring the bill over when they think we're done eating and just tell us to pay whenever we're ready. I sat at the table for a good 15min just browsing my phone with no food or drink on the table until I decided to call a waiter over. They told me when I'm ready, I can pay at the front counter.
Went to Brazil to visit my wife's family and we ordered some street food. I tried to pay upon order and my wife told me they take payment after we finish eating even if it's street food... After eating, we totally forgot that we haven't paid yet and just got up and walked away because we're so used to paying upon order. About 50metres of walking, I was like, wait... We didn't pay for the food. We rushed back to pay and the cooks had a good laugh about it.
Immense portions in restaurants and then taking a slightly less immense (but still big) boxful of leftovers home. Calling the main course an entrée, when entrée means starter/appetiser.
Hospitals connected to specific insurances (and you having to make sure you go to the right one, how do you even do that after a car crash..?)
Free water at restaurants, and water just being brought to the table by default without you ordering it. I definitely prefer the American way. I literally always want water with my meal, regardless of whether I am also ordering something else to drink.
My experience is that Americans don't often consider people outside of America. My American family are lovely people but they are insular patriots and they've never had a reason to think outside of America really.
And to answer your question, most of it is monetary assumptions. They were blown away that we don't tip everyone for everything. They were also surprised they knew the exact amount they were going to pay for something before they hit the till.
I’m sorry your family are classic “Ugly Americans”, but most of us aren’t. We DO take other countries into consideration, and are good travelers—-not tourists, there’s a difference. Unfortunately, we don’t get the press that the uglies do, so people assume we’re all the same. We’re definitely not.
Drinking out of red solo cups in college. A friend of mine studied abroad in London and said her new friends asked if we actually used them or if they were “only in the movies.”
This is (from what I've been told by others outside the state) more of a Texas thing, but if someone asks how far away something is we tell them a time frame, not how many miles. This has been the standard my whole life, so hearing that other people don't do this is weird to me.
The gas pump only turning on after you’ve paid. I was in the UK and filling up my rental at a somewhat rural station and was flabbergasted that I was supposed to pay after. I asked the guy if people ever leave without paying and he just shrugged and said “sometimes, but not often enough that it’s a problem”
In the UK the pumps unlock after numberplate recognition kicks in, so if you leave without paying, the police know who you are. It's also common for the larger petrol companies these days to allow payment in advance through their app, and the pump will shut off when you've reached the amount you prepaid. Much quicker!
Calling the main meal an entrée.
Elsewhere (most of the world, including France from where the word comes), it’s the course preceding the main course.
Synonyms are appetiser, starter or hors d'oeuvre.
Edit: hors d’oeuvres are not the same as appetisers - I used the term as a generality to differentiate main from non-main courses.
Thanks to those who pulled me up on the specificity 😊🥂
English does have quite a few "borrowed" words. Sometimes words change meanings.
Credit.
I mean, we can take a credit if we want to, pretty much everywhere in the world. But everyday's life in America seem to revolve around credit, from your student loan, to your health payments, to your mortgage, but also seemingly for all and everything and everyday's purchases, and all Americans I know always have half a dozen of credit cards they use to pay one another in a complex game of optimization. The very notion of credit score is also absent in most of the world outside of America.
Take the example of France (where I live). Most people have a single credit or two, for their house payment and sometimes for their car. Everytime you want to subscribe to a new credit, they will look into your current credits and your taxable income to make sure you can afford it, and that's about it. No complex stuff. People have a single "credit" card but many (myself included) don't even use the credit feature, we opt for immediate debit. Much easier to track your current balance. I am a father of 3, well in my forties, with a house, a car, an e-bike, a rather "expensive" lifestyle because of the 3 kids. And I have a single (big, lol) credit for the house. Of course, some less fortunate may need to make more use of credit, but it's not in the general mindset : if you can avoid it, don't use it. People tend, as much as they can, to make provision for future purchases and then pay cash (or very short-term like 4 month).
where I live in Europe everyone just uses direct debit cards... ppl generally only start getting credit cards because they need it for a certain purchase or for a holiday in certain countries that aren't covered by the debit cards (for example... I don't own a credit card because my debit card has a world-coverage)... also in my country you don't build credit with your credit card... has nothing to do with it... it's just a different means of payment... you don't need a credit card to get a mortgage, or a car, or a house... just enough money on your bank account (both debit & credit cards are attached to the same bank account)...
When I came to US from Canada to see a friend, after dinner when we were splitting the bill they asked if I could just venmo it over. And then I told them we don’t have venmo. And then I saw the shocked pikachu meme face around me.
So I’m gonna say venmo.
Move around only in cars
Well, when everything is a hundred miles away with no public transit whatsoever, what ya gonna do?
Yep. Where I live, there’s virtually no public transport. There’s only really mediocre buses and they only cover a small portion of the area. Pretty much everyone HAS to drive :(
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I live in a rural area, and there's no public transport. I don't have a choice.
Same in where I live (Northern Finland) but we bike or alk and sometimes cross-country ski when it's winter
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Southern California suburbs. I defy you to walk to the market and back in August.
Same here XD I had a brief period where I couldn’t drive due to vision issues, so I had to ride my bike. (This was before the rise of delivery services.) Grocery shopping was a nightmare. And if I had to take my cat to the vet? I’m calling in a favor from a friend XD And yeah, going ANYWHERE by foot or by bike in the months from June to September is a nightmare.
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You mean New York CITY, what about the rest of New York STATE? You need a car.
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The auto industry and taxi cab unions have done everything they can to kill as much public transportation as possible in the USA while also stigmatizing it as much as possible. We only have it in a few cities like Chicago, Boston and NYC. Los Angeles has it, but to quote a native "it runs from where nobody lives to where nobody works".
Also if there is public transportation in most places it isn’t very reliable or comes frequently enough. I’m a med student in Seattle and it doesn’t make sense to take the bus. It can take 1.5 hrs to get to a hospital 10 miles away. The 10 miles is too far and not safe enough to bike and spending 3 hrs on a bus every day is wasteful when time is so valuable. Trust me….most Americans wish public transportation was more available and accessible!
Not true. Chicago has great public buses and trains and lots of people use them. It's very common for people who move to Chicago to sell their car within the first two years. If you don't need to go to the suburbs, it's often more of a hassle and expense to pay for parking and dig your car out all winter..
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again, a person who knows nothing about the US but what they have heard from other Europeans, in urban areas people get around plenty on public transportation, also people fly, the city I live in has 7 airports that are either in it or in the surrounding suburbs. The US is so large that there is rarely a homogeneous way of doing anything, this is something that Europeans don't understand about the US, our states are bigger than countries in Europe, Each region does things differently, yet Europeans learn about how they do things in one region and wrongly apply that to the entire country, sadly a lot of young Americans believe these misconceptions Europeans are putting out onto the internet
I'm American and do not own a car. I also live in Montana, a state that does not have a robust public transportation system. It's not common, but it can be done.
If you have enough people in your life that you can rely on to constantly be doing you favours, sure.
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Uhhh. This is kinda necessary. You ever seen some of the distances between just normal towns in the Midwest? Trains and buses would be inconvenient for such travel.
I live in the country ,in Australia so I totally get this. It's a minimum half hour drive just to do our shopping.
Visited Pitsburgh last month to watch hockey. Wanted to visit Walmart for funzies. Took a buss, it took 50 minutes to get there. We also wanted to visit Burlingtons and other stores, but we coudn't because Walmart was on a top of a hill and there were NO walkways out of there. We SAW the roofs of the other buildings, they were maybe a half a mile away, but it would have been impossible to walk there since there wasn't even an unofficial path in a grass, nothing. The only way out was the road full of cars.
Being as the U.S. is a capitalist country, long-distance public transport doesn't get built unless it will be profitable to whomever is putting up the money to build it. Most local transport systems are handled by tax money. A frighteningly large percentage of the population equates socialism with communism.
There's always public transit in the big cities. I think it's different here because the U.S is so much bigger in size
You can kiss my a*s if you think I'm going to sit on a f*****g bus for 2-hrs. every day when I can get there by car in about 30 minutes, plus I can go wherever the hell I feel like at any given time. It's different in the city, but outside elsewhere it's a whole other story.
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They don't have any, lol. We're so terrible that they can't find anything new to gripe on us and feel superior about, so they just recycle it in different ways.
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The highschools in the US always confused me as a kid. In my country we just study in the same classroom for every subject (except sports and computer) so I never really got the point of going around the whole school in order to attend your classes edit: i don’t understand in what way my comment was wrong as i have a few downvotes. I’ll only be able to rectify myself if someone tells me what I did wrong
You have not done anything wrong, you legitimately said something you find strange that people do in the US but not in other countries. Unfortunately there are some people on here who will vote down anything questioning how Americans do things
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Ah boy, BoredPanda can’t even go a week without bashing the US. Enough with these lists— they are plain lazy. You have freaking writers on your staff— use them!!
People keep thinking of the USA as a single, actually unified country that is the same wherever you go within it. Totally wrong. Our individual states have their own state governments and only loosely submit to the federal government in Washington DC. We are much more like 40-50 small countries with open borders and trade agreements. Geographically, the west, east, north, and south of the USA are ALL very very different places and the people that live in those places are not like people from any different area within the US. We are unified pretty much only when someone attacks us. Thats about it.
It'd be interesting then, to see the same kind of post/article but comparing states :-)
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Yes, Europeans, you're superior. We get it. Also, that line of thinking has led Europe (not just England) to commit horrible genocide and culture theft. At least in America, you might find someone from one of the cultures you killed.
Yeah you got down voted for telling the truth. The big ugly truth is that European colonizers and settlers murdered Native Americans starting with the Spanish then half of Europe joined in. The Holocaust was nothing compared to the genocide the Euros did against the natives of this land.
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Wonder that nobody mentioned credit cards. In america it seems that even the poorest people have at least one credit card, where in germany only the wealthier people have them. And in that vein: credit cards issued by anything else but a bank. It always weirds me out when I read a story online where a super market cashier has to ask customers if they want to open a store credit card...
You must not know many poor people. They often use cash exclusively and don't use banks at all (too many fees and requirements). There's actually laws being consider to prevent business from refusing cash (they trying it) and doing payments only in digital precisely because it cuts off poor people from being able to buy things.
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The customer service other than in the states. Welcome. You shop. You pay. Thank you. Done. And also how much less of a rush it all is compared to usa. I-95 here in Connecticut is like a nascar race everyday. Fast fast pass hope you don't crash.
Secondary school (high school in the US) being such a defining period. You're still a kid, you're supposed to move on afterwards, most of those people and stories fade out of your life.
They really do. I don't know who said "High school are the best years of your life!" but I feel sorry for them. 45 is way better than 17 (for me anyway!)
Load More Replies... Meatloaf and pot roasts. Calling all black people "African American"
They don't have any, lol. We're so terrible that they can't find anything new to gripe on us and feel superior about, so they just recycle it in different ways.
Load More Replies... The highschools in the US always confused me as a kid. In my country we just study in the same classroom for every subject (except sports and computer) so I never really got the point of going around the whole school in order to attend your classes edit: i don’t understand in what way my comment was wrong as i have a few downvotes. I’ll only be able to rectify myself if someone tells me what I did wrong
You have not done anything wrong, you legitimately said something you find strange that people do in the US but not in other countries. Unfortunately there are some people on here who will vote down anything questioning how Americans do things
Load More Replies... Ah boy, BoredPanda can’t even go a week without bashing the US. Enough with these lists— they are plain lazy. You have freaking writers on your staff— use them!!
People keep thinking of the USA as a single, actually unified country that is the same wherever you go within it. Totally wrong. Our individual states have their own state governments and only loosely submit to the federal government in Washington DC. We are much more like 40-50 small countries with open borders and trade agreements. Geographically, the west, east, north, and south of the USA are ALL very very different places and the people that live in those places are not like people from any different area within the US. We are unified pretty much only when someone attacks us. Thats about it.
It'd be interesting then, to see the same kind of post/article but comparing states :-)
Load More Replies... Yes, Europeans, you're superior. We get it. Also, that line of thinking has led Europe (not just England) to commit horrible genocide and culture theft. At least in America, you might find someone from one of the cultures you killed.
Yeah you got down voted for telling the truth. The big ugly truth is that European colonizers and settlers murdered Native Americans starting with the Spanish then half of Europe joined in. The Holocaust was nothing compared to the genocide the Euros did against the natives of this land.
Load More Replies... Wonder that nobody mentioned credit cards. In america it seems that even the poorest people have at least one credit card, where in germany only the wealthier people have them. And in that vein: credit cards issued by anything else but a bank. It always weirds me out when I read a story online where a super market cashier has to ask customers if they want to open a store credit card...
You must not know many poor people. They often use cash exclusively and don't use banks at all (too many fees and requirements). There's actually laws being consider to prevent business from refusing cash (they trying it) and doing payments only in digital precisely because it cuts off poor people from being able to buy things.
Load More Replies... The customer service other than in the states. Welcome. You shop. You pay. Thank you. Done. And also how much less of a rush it all is compared to usa. I-95 here in Connecticut is like a nascar race everyday. Fast fast pass hope you don't crash.
Secondary school (high school in the US) being such a defining period. You're still a kid, you're supposed to move on afterwards, most of those people and stories fade out of your life.
They really do. I don't know who said "High school are the best years of your life!" but I feel sorry for them. 45 is way better than 17 (for me anyway!)
Load More Replies... Meatloaf and pot roasts. Calling all black people "African American"
