Fun fact: No one agrees about continents, but of course what I say is the absolute truth ;-).
I went to study in Canada for two years and then back again to Austria, and still I failed to notice that there was disagreement about the continents.
I only noticed one day when I clicked on the “discussion” tab on some Wikipedia page - I don’t remember which, and found a flame war about whether citizens of the USA had the right to refer to their country as “America” and to themselves as “Americans”, or whether that term also included all of Latin America.
“It’s the name if the continent we live on, it’s rude to take that for yourself”, said someone from Argentina.
“There is no continent by the name of ‘America’”, someone from the US replied. It quickly went downhill from there, as some South Americans started openly questioning that person’s sanity. Aparently, when speaking English, “the Americas” are two continents, while in South America, they understand “South America” to refer to the Southern part of a continent called “America”.
There are, of course, exactly five inhabited continents:
The five rings symbolize the five continents participating in the Games, Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia. The division between Europe and Asia is pure Eurocentrism, but hey, the Olympic Games are our invention, after all.
Frankly, this is just about the only context when I ever needed to count continents. For symbolism only. And so I am sticking to tradition.
There is also a 1989 Austrian film by Michael Haneke titled “The Seventh Continent”. Bonus Fun Fact: The English-language Wikipedia page claims the titular Seventh Continent refers to Australia, while the German-language Wikipedia page claims it’s a “metaphor for an imaginary place of isolation”.
Bwahahaha - Apparently 10% of those USians asked isn’t even able to find the USA on a map. If US-centric education doesn’t help with that nothing will …
I’m the former, and have met plenty of the latter.
Furthermore I don’t have any certifications. (I just tell people “I’m certified, all right.”) There is one for my line of work, but it’s about the price of a car, and I haven’t worked for anyone willing to foot the bill.
I’m sort of the former. I’m an electrical engineer who knows enough programming to be dangerous. In general, I can write decent code, but when it comes to web design and other front-end stuff, that’s purely in the software domain and I don’t know the first thing about any of that.
I was actually talked out of going for a PE license. I passed the FE/EIT like it was nothing, but the PE test is a huge hassle and not even a nice-to-have unless one works in public safety, which I don’t.
There’s a large globe, about that old, in my office. It (the globe*) predates the UAE, South Yemen, Eritrea… Old names include Upper Volta, Dahomey, Spanish Sahara, and Muscat and Oman (as opposed to just “Oman”).
*(EDIT: The office may precede those places, too – the building itself certainly does, though by only a few years.)
Yep, it’s still Ceylon on this globe.
The furniture store on The Goldbergs is named “Ottoman Empire.”
I still have a globe that’s about that old. There are these strange countries called Yugoslavia and USSR, and the Czech Republic and Slovakia were the same country for some strange reason.
Can we agree that Dahomey sounds too funny to be taken seriously as a country?
