I make the bigness point every time I tangle with one of these snobbish Europeans: "You Americans aren't multilingual (and are therefore not as sophisticated) as we are."
I tell 'em, "Do you know what 'Balkanized' means? I can drive 1,200 miles from San Diego to Seattle and speak one language all the way. I can drive 2,800 miles from Los Angeles to New York and speak the same language all the way. In Europe, if I drive 1,000 miles from Brussels to Rome, I have to know at least three different languages. You people HAD to be multilingual because you are so fragmented, we don't because we are united."
Then they get huffy.
“Then they get huffy.”
I used to tell them: if it weren’t for us, you also would have been monolingual; GERMAN, that is!
You could also tell them that back during the Pax Romana, you could freely travel from southern Scotland to the upper reaches of the Nile, or from Gibraltar to eastern Syria. You can’t do that today.
I had a similar conversation, but it was with a gal that just got back from a trip to europe...she commented on how many languages people spoke. I just reminded her that if every state was a different country, we would speak many different languages also...she laughed and said “I never thought of it that way...”
LOL.
Well, we're not as densely packed as in Europe, so you HAVE to have a car.
One of my medical students from Germany kept talking about how "ridiculous and huge" my Olds Delta 88 was.
Course he couldn't keep his big yapper shut about how "great" socialism was, either.