Not just every country, according to jms:
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I thought they were Scottish.
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This must be the best sentence ever published in The Shreveport Journal.
It makes me long for an Imo’s bacon pizza with a crunchy, cracker-like crust covered in provel cheese
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There has to be a Harry Dresden quote for that.
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I was in grad school with a woman from China, who hadn’t experienced pizza until she had some at lab parties. She liked it, so decided once to get a takeout pizza for dinner. She went to the pizzeria to pick it up, they gave it to her, and she immediately turned it 90 degrees on its side, carrying it like a book under her arm. “When I got home, I learned why you don’t carry it that way. And why the guy at the shop gave me a funny look.”
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Maybe to a young whippersnapper. When I was growing up, if you crossed a street, the billboards and shop signs would be in a different language. If you were in the German section of town, you ate German food. If you were in the Polish section of town, ditto. Swedish? Andersenville on the north side. The Italian section of town was razed when the University of Illinois wanted to build a satellite campus on the near south side, although there are still remnants.
I can’t speak for the suburbs in those days, as I didn’t spend time there.
But that’s how Minneapolis was, as well. And Milwaukee. And St Louis. And lots of other cities, large and small. What’s the point of comparing them to hamlets of only a few thousand people? Every state has the same gradations of population density.
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I was thinking more of traditional holiday foods - one of the few areas where actual traditions are kept, as certainly most cuisines are incredibly recent, requiring ingredients that have only become available in recent centuries (e.g. modern Italian food being heavily based on new world vegetables, that took centuries to actually get adopted) or are the result of outside cultural contributions (e.g. the Portuguese influence resulting in both Japanese tempura and British fish and chips…). (In the US you see ingredients exported to the rest of the world, and then the dishes they inspired eventually being later imported back and only then being made part of the cuisine, ironically.)
But you will see holiday dishes with origins going back many centuries in a lot of cultures. Except in the US, where even the ubiquitous holiday foods tend to be pretty modern - either because the dish is a recent invention, or varied traditional forms of the dish were more recently supplanted by a single version. It always feels a bit ironic that the most reviled holiday food - the fruitcake - is also fundamentally the oldest; somehow being hated has kept it alive.
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To be “right,” of course.
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That video and the “human-like” pronunciations are hard proof aliens are real and have been among us since the 50s.
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The Mac/Mc distinction isn’t hard and fast, especially given the variations in spelling common a couple of centuries ago.
Interestingly, I read Men Against the Sea years ago, and in the court records of the trial of the Bounty mutineers there are names like M’Intosh and M’Koy.
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Clearly! Splitting the pie into equal-sized pieces…? (Clutching pearls)
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My grandmother’s family records on that side list Magee, McGee, MaGhee etc. in various records for various relatives. It’s not hard and fast for the same person sometimes. Though some of her people used a mark and not a signature- so one can’t blame them. Glasgow.
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Shakespeare is best in the original Klingon.
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The red sauce was a dead giveaway!
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I mean, a lot of that is probably just that the country as we know it now (with apologies to Native American nations) is not very old. Speaking as a Canadian (who acknowledges I occupy the unceded territory of various First Nations) this effect is even more pronounced. We have almost no culture at all. Poutine, hockey, weird potato chip flavours, and a few other things. We cling with ferocity to those few things, but the current culture has only been around for a 150 years or so. That’s nothin’ on cultural time scales.
That was also an English import. I have some friends from Yorkshire who take their Christmas fruitcakes very very seriously. They “feed” (fill with alcohol) them for weeks before the big day.
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The feeding…Have you heard the Dave & Morley story (on “the vinyl cafe”) about Dave’s fruitcake?
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I have not!
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A friend of mine, of Scottish ancestry, is named McGhee, just to add to your list. Related to Clan Mackay, IIRC. (Mackay is pronounced MacEYE, unlike another friend, last name McKay, pronounced to rhyme with “play”.)
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I think it’s in the show called “Christmas Presents,” but I’m not good at finding the audio archives. He feeds the thing like a precious pet for weeks, and…well, it does not arrive at the party as he’d intended.
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