chat

So there's a term, "b**** eating crackers" (BEC), which just means someone who you despise so much that you're offended by even very minor or innocuous things that that person does, such as eating crackers. So, in short, even though you wouldn't normally care about a particular behavior, the fact that it's being done by someone you really, really hate... suddenly makes you care.

Seppoland/USA and its people have won the ire of much of the world for more than enough legitimate reasons, however I sometimes think that many people have actually reached the point of treating Yankees as a group of three hundred million plus "b****es eating crackers": that absolutely everything a Yankee does has to be judged negatively and ascribed to Yankees being lazy or stupid or arrogant or whatever else, even if this isn't necessarily true. Seppolanders are oftentimes plenty ignorant, and oftentimes plenty arrogant, but that still doesn't mean that literally everything they do is a product of those traits.

So, my point, is that using state codes is really a pretty innocuous thing to do, that doesn't necessarily warrant any sort of vocally negative response or being declared a product of arrogance. It's just a thing that Yankees do because that's their communication style, or it's how they're used to talking.

At the same time, I might only be saying this because I sometimes like to be a contrarian, and that I'm simply less bothered by this sort of thing because I've already memorized the locations and codes of every country on Earth, every state of Seppoland, every province of Canada, every state of Australia, every county of my own country Norway, and various other regions in other countries. If someone wanted to say "I live in Somewheresville, OH" I'd be as confused by that as "I live in Somewheresville, QLD" or "I live in Irgendwosstadt, DE" — I know in every case what the codes mean, the rough part of the world where the two-letter places are, and some basic facts about the places, because I just like to learn about different places. Even if I don't know what a code means, I'll just look it up and probably spend several minutes reading about that place for my own enjoyment.

Then there's also the matter of me having American heritage, and me having visited several states of Seppoland. That might bias me towards apologism, or it might just mean that, while I've spent my whole life since birth in Europe, I still grew up through my family in a culture that, compared to the general population, sees distinguishing between the states of Seppoland as more important.

...After all, while Yorkshire is just a fraction of one nation, the State of New York actually contains the territory of several nations partially or entirely within its arbitrary borders, no different from the European colonies in Africa that first worlders also often struggle to place on a map and also often cannot name a single tribe from.