blamebrampton | A case in point ...

A case in point ...

So, there we were, having a chat on a friend's LJ about the differences between the US and the UK for purposes of a self-Britpicking list, with participants from both sides of the pond and beyond and frequent diversions into baiting and comedy from all sides, and apparently it has become a source of Flocked Drama.

Consider the argument very carefully: At least one American is very upset that British people prefer to be depicted in accurate ways.

And if you can't see why that's a bit dodgy, replace the word British with any other nationality.

I don't want to overstate the case, because really, it doesn't culturally oppress us the way that some other cultures have been oppressed by this sort of thing, since we don't deeply care and we had an Empire first. And while the original source of the complaint is a preference, it's certainly not a sine qua non, and we read heaps of stuff that gets us wrong, and some of it is good and some is crap, and really, at the end of the day we still pronounce and spell aluminium in ways that are scientifically logical, which in itself is enough. But, honestly ...

Interestingly, one of my points of difference was a tendency to soap-opera-like over-reactions in fiction. Clearly I drew the line too narrowly.

AND I left off the fact that it the entire United States has been the subject of mass-brainwashing to accept caffeinated flavoured beverages as coffee. Though I see Starbucks has dropped the word from their logo, truth in advertising at last!

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1/2-1/2 tastes more similar to cream than US milk, I think :). Milk in the US is this really, really strange tasting liquid that gave me a bit of a shock the first time I downed it—and not necessarily in a good way; I was a brave and polite little trooper though and finished it!!!!! :D I still miss my imported Australian milk from the days when I was little—that milk, I personally think, tastes more like cream here :DDDDD.

Oh we're awful. Even in Australia, where the Chinese are in recorded history from four years after it begins (and were in all probability here for centuries before that), we're still often awful. I will grant that Australian fiction is better on Chinese-Australians, who are not irregularly well-represented.

OK, what we need to do is all go to the shops and write down the fat content of each dairy product and then compare and contrast. I feel certain we can come up with useful data!

Now I'm just very curious about what you call milk! I mean, I'm not a milk drinker, but when I put it in things (my chai from Starbucks, for one, heh) it's always 1% or Fat Free, which is the closest you can get to water and still be white. From reading your comment I'm assuming I would get a very rude awakening asking for milk in your neck of the woods and ending up with your version of buttermilk, which is so very milk it would probably make me gag. :p

Normal Australian milk is about 4% fat, British milk is very slightly less, often about 3.6%. Wikipedia tells me that raw milk is just under 4% naturally, which could be true, from memory of milking, pouring into a bottle, sticking in the stream and drinking later. 1% is most of the way to skimmed for me!

Use a Britpicker (And hope that their Britpicking matches up with the opinions of every single other Brit in HP fandom. Good luck with that.)

That is a pitfall no matter what you're doing. I once wanted to use a bit of French in a fic. I half know French in that I know vocab and general conjugations, but I certainly don't know how to speak it as a native of France would, so I had a person who WAS a native of France tell me how to say what I wanted to say the way she would say it. Once the fic was posted another native of France, and someone who is French Canadian, both told me that I was wrong. Not that any of my words were wrong, but that I had said it in a way they wouldn't have. Why hadn't I just done my research, they said. At that point I just kind of shrugged and told them I had, but you're never going to make everyone happy.

Ah. Okay, in looking at the chart American whole milk is about 3.25% fat, which would be a little less than British milk, but definitely noticeable next to Australian milk. American Half and Half looks to be 10 - 18% though, which would probably be strange for just drinking to any of the people who drank the classes of milk mentioned above.

I must be alive, I learned something today. ♥

Hardly one has watched American soap operas for the last ten years, which is why almost all (save a couple hold outs) one by one have been cancelled over the past five years. Seriously.

Hollywood movies seem far more influential to fanfic and writing in general.

I agree that class is a book in itself! Love to hear your POV on it in HP sometime -- one of my profs was a guy named John Fiske (wrote Reading Television, among othoers, if I've got the title right -- this was in the late 80s) who thought everything on tv, Brit or American, was about class, and couldn't help agreeing with him.

It sounds like the metapiece will be fascinating. I love to read Britglish all the time just for the pleasure of finding out difference -- have hung out there ever since I was researching for Squib and found out carnivals are "fun fairs." What drives me crazy are the stories which not only take Americanisms as "normal" but assume that wizarding culture is going to be the same as their own -- hence we have fics where all the main characters smoke, get wasted every weekend, and care about designer labels. Hmmm, would enjoy your discussing the differences between British teenagers and adults, too. Because it's conceivably possible all the most imp't soccer players smoke... just unlikely to me.

Every country has cultural variance between regions. Europe is not a country with a uniformly shared government, shared set of laws, shared constitution, shared history that's taught as part of a regular school curriculum; it never has been, so I'm not sure how comparing Europe to America in this respect makes any sense.

France and Portugal may be tiny, but they too have cultural variance between regions. Shit, there is cultural variance in Japan, and one would think that was strange, as small and isolated as it's been from outside influence for centuries. The presence of regional differences (and the presence of immigrant populations, which are certainly not unique to the USA) doesn't mean there is no overarching culture in those places. The claim that "the USA is multicultural" is certainly accurate, but the presence of outside or regional cultural influences doesn't by itself preclude uniform cultural influences.

When I hang out with my Canada born-and-raised friends, I tune them out when they start going on about Paddington Bear and Degrassi and Ashley Macisaac and hockey. I've lived and worked here for well over a decade and speak one of the national languages with a barely noticeable accent, but I could never "pass for Canadian" if I'm put in a room of born-and-raised Canucks and forced to speak with them, because when they start talking about their shared experience growing up, I have nothing to bring to the table.

That shared experience is certainly not uniform in that not every single born-and-raised Canadian will have watched ALL the same shows and read ALL the same books and listened to ALL the same music, but there's enough cross-hatch for at least passing familiarity (and thus an ability to relate that just doesn't exist for most outsiders). These kinds of things that no outsider can ever fully identify with are what makes up Canadian culture, and by all accounts it's no different in the US. (I call this the "not everyone grew up with Sesame Street" effect.) As much as I might watch Paddington Bear now, I will never have the experience of being a Canadian child [who goes to a Canadian school and has Canadian friends] who watches it.

There are plenty of cultural influences that are uniquely American, and they exist independently of "home-country" cultural influences in immigrant or post-immigrant communities. One doesn't have to travel extensively in America to see these influences, one just has to be an outsider and turn their TV to CNN.

The soap opera-watching McDonald's eating coffee-guzzling housewife who drives a minivan is a stupid stereotype, but it's not stupid because there's no such thing as American culture.

They are very much what I was thinking of in the overly influenced by soap writing category. Transformers, everything Katherine Heigl has ever been in and the entire Law and Order franchise are particularly guilty! Though you suggest a possible transmission vector as all those writers have had to find work somewhere.

I disagree.

o.O I think there's a language gap here.
An American 'soap opera' refers to a daytime serial (usually containing a hospital, police station, and some insanely wealthy family's mansion as the main sets).

Okay!

LOL! And yes, I screwed up and responded to what one makes the tea (ie "white") as opposed to the substance. momeble's comparison of fat content fascinates me... I think I need to find out what "heavy" cream is (I doubt it's 100% fat, but I could be wrong.) I am not fond of cream in tea so much as half and half. When I was little, my mom referred to "coffee cream" and "whipping cream." One more abhorrent practice by factory-farmed US dairies, btw, is to put carrageenan (seaweed derivative) into the "whipping cream" to make sure it whips. Adds a slightly off flavour to good milk...

Oooh, bedtime. Good confusion -- and research could be fun. I always assumed that where there's a word, there's a phenomenon -- and my beta keeps reminding me to spell it "pyjamas." (She's Hungarian, btw, and absolutely committed to pure Brit... and spelling the words in HP right, including capitals, which is so not my thing. OTOH, as you can tell from my icon, I REALLY care about spelling, punctuation, and verb tense.) (Would be curious where you are with "might." The most American thing I notice is that no one uses subjunctive form any more...)

Exactly how do you define "culture"?

Define "soap opera" please.

There is no single definition for culture, but the closest to me is "behaviour and beliefs acquired through social learning".

I have found that the popular culture, art, and media in the three countries I've lived in as a card-carrying local have tended to provide fairly accurate representations of expected/common beliefs and behaviours.

...because there's no such thing as American culture.

I don't understand this statement.

That wasn't the whole sentence.

What I said was that stereotypes aren't stupid because there's no such thing as American culture (that is, they're stupid for other reasons). Because there IS such a thing as American culture. That was kind of the whole point of the comment preceding the last sentence...

I will. (And if they come after me with pitchforks, I will blame you!)

*gasps in outrage as I hug my Starbucks*

They are delightfully obliging.

~dreams~

WEll you'd be wrong about that - a lot of my European flisties and I do see ourselves as having a common European culture. We do. We have a lot of history in common, though usually on the other side, and a lot of economic and political beliefs in common.

If you read hetfic, you would see that the things we discussed about virginity being prized, no sex before marriage, patriarchal and rigid gender roles are all there. And when they're there I see them as written by Americans. Noting the correlation between the two doesn't mean all Americans are like that / believe that, but neither does the fact that some Americans don't think that mean that it isn't an artefact of American and not English culture.

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