"West"
I’ve long been aware of certain irregularities with regards to the things which people call places, and it has long bothered me.
Some years ago, I had it explained that the barbarians and lunatics down south of the border refer to the region of their country clustered around the Great Lakes as the “Mid-West.” This immediately rang false for me, looking at a map of their country; the entire region was plainly in the eastern half of the country, albeit somewhat bumping up against the mid-point of the country, in such a way as to come as close to the west as one could come without actually BEING west in any meaningful way.
I offered up the observation that, being in the eastern part of the middle of the country, it could reasonably be called the “Middle east”, or “Mid-East”, if you prefer. Indeed, a case could be made that in that it’s on the far western edge of the eastern half of the country, I would even accept the idea of it being called the “Western-East”. Though I acknowledge that doing so brings with it a certain amount of confusion, at least it is a confusion which could be dispelled with a reasonable explanation, in which sense it has a leg up on the current “Mid-West” fiasco.
Not to be entirely culturally elitist, I must admit that this is a problem which exists even in my own country, and nowhere more glaringly than in the apocalyptic wasteland of the mind which is Alberta (or “Cold Texas” as I like to call it). There’s a conversation I’ve had a number of times with various Albertans which has had only minor variations from person to person, which can best be characterized by one particular instance from a couple of years ago:
I had ordered a couple of small pizzas at work, and one of which was of a type with three tangible toppings and one intangible topping, each of which are vital to the appeal of the dish. The tangible toppings were and are green pepper, feta cheese and shrimp. The intangible one is spite. This came about as something of an unexpected surprise; some years earlier, I had been forced to spend time with an appalling toad of a man named Alex, who claimed to be allergic to all sea foods. I came up with what I thought would be a deliberately disgusting combination of toppings which I had planned to eat with exaggerated relish in front of him in an effort to offend his sensibilities. To my considerable surprise, the pizza was conspicuously awesome. I credit this, as earlier-implied, at least in part to that fourth intangible topping, but the merit of the first three cannot be under-sold either. I’ve introduced a great many people to this combination since then, going about it with a sort of missionary zeal, and it was on one such an occasion that I attempted to get an Albertan to eat some.
“Naw, I don’t eat anything that comes out of the water. I guess my tastes are too Western”, he droned. The capitalization of the word western here is deliberate; it plainly couldn’t have been a reference to a direction so much as a named culture, for reasons which I articulated thus: “If you go far west enough, you know where you end up? In the OCEAN. Seafood is thus the most definitively and inarguably WESTERN food there is! If your issue is one of ‘western identity’, then I can assure you that you stand no risk of betraying it by eating sea food!”
He would have none of it, though; to him, as to many Albertans “Western” had nothing to do with concepts as concrete as longitude or geography. It was just something they felt, somewhere deep in their skulls, where the brain would in any other case be located. It was a brand name, a label, a state of mind. The Albertans had long ago claimed for themselves the identity of “Western Canada”, and fuck anyone who claimed to be more western than them based upon evidence as flimsy as a compas’s wavering needle. To be more western was to be more definitively Albertan, which meant among other things being more closed-minded to ideas such as that “west” was an indication of direction which was relative to the actual spot where you happened to be standing.
He ultimately refused to taste my cockpunchingly awesome pizza, and in retrospect, there’s a part of me that’s glad; I’m not sure I would have wanted to share it with someone whose concept of direction was as arbitrary as a man standing at the north pole’s might be. I feel it would have sullied my awesome Spite Pizza in some way, and then it would have been cursed with the presumably-less-delicious second intangible topping of dismay. And I know for a fact I wouldn’t pay for a Dismay Pizza. The very thought of it fills me with a certain nameless sense of agitation, alarm, anxiety, apprehension, and so-forth on down through the alphabet.
tl;dr: Stupid people shouldn’t get to name regions in ways which involve directions without first consulting a map of the landmass they’re standing on and a geography teacher capable of explaining the concept of longitude to them.
Some years ago, I had it explained that the barbarians and lunatics down south of the border refer to the region of their country clustered around the Great Lakes as the “Mid-West.” This immediately rang false for me, looking at a map of their country; the entire region was plainly in the eastern half of the country, albeit somewhat bumping up against the mid-point of the country, in such a way as to come as close to the west as one could come without actually BEING west in any meaningful way.
I offered up the observation that, being in the eastern part of the middle of the country, it could reasonably be called the “Middle east”, or “Mid-East”, if you prefer. Indeed, a case could be made that in that it’s on the far western edge of the eastern half of the country, I would even accept the idea of it being called the “Western-East”. Though I acknowledge that doing so brings with it a certain amount of confusion, at least it is a confusion which could be dispelled with a reasonable explanation, in which sense it has a leg up on the current “Mid-West” fiasco.
Not to be entirely culturally elitist, I must admit that this is a problem which exists even in my own country, and nowhere more glaringly than in the apocalyptic wasteland of the mind which is Alberta (or “Cold Texas” as I like to call it). There’s a conversation I’ve had a number of times with various Albertans which has had only minor variations from person to person, which can best be characterized by one particular instance from a couple of years ago:
I had ordered a couple of small pizzas at work, and one of which was of a type with three tangible toppings and one intangible topping, each of which are vital to the appeal of the dish. The tangible toppings were and are green pepper, feta cheese and shrimp. The intangible one is spite. This came about as something of an unexpected surprise; some years earlier, I had been forced to spend time with an appalling toad of a man named Alex, who claimed to be allergic to all sea foods. I came up with what I thought would be a deliberately disgusting combination of toppings which I had planned to eat with exaggerated relish in front of him in an effort to offend his sensibilities. To my considerable surprise, the pizza was conspicuously awesome. I credit this, as earlier-implied, at least in part to that fourth intangible topping, but the merit of the first three cannot be under-sold either. I’ve introduced a great many people to this combination since then, going about it with a sort of missionary zeal, and it was on one such an occasion that I attempted to get an Albertan to eat some.
“Naw, I don’t eat anything that comes out of the water. I guess my tastes are too Western”, he droned. The capitalization of the word western here is deliberate; it plainly couldn’t have been a reference to a direction so much as a named culture, for reasons which I articulated thus: “If you go far west enough, you know where you end up? In the OCEAN. Seafood is thus the most definitively and inarguably WESTERN food there is! If your issue is one of ‘western identity’, then I can assure you that you stand no risk of betraying it by eating sea food!”
He would have none of it, though; to him, as to many Albertans “Western” had nothing to do with concepts as concrete as longitude or geography. It was just something they felt, somewhere deep in their skulls, where the brain would in any other case be located. It was a brand name, a label, a state of mind. The Albertans had long ago claimed for themselves the identity of “Western Canada”, and fuck anyone who claimed to be more western than them based upon evidence as flimsy as a compas’s wavering needle. To be more western was to be more definitively Albertan, which meant among other things being more closed-minded to ideas such as that “west” was an indication of direction which was relative to the actual spot where you happened to be standing.
He ultimately refused to taste my cockpunchingly awesome pizza, and in retrospect, there’s a part of me that’s glad; I’m not sure I would have wanted to share it with someone whose concept of direction was as arbitrary as a man standing at the north pole’s might be. I feel it would have sullied my awesome Spite Pizza in some way, and then it would have been cursed with the presumably-less-delicious second intangible topping of dismay. And I know for a fact I wouldn’t pay for a Dismay Pizza. The very thought of it fills me with a certain nameless sense of agitation, alarm, anxiety, apprehension, and so-forth on down through the alphabet.
tl;dr: Stupid people shouldn’t get to name regions in ways which involve directions without first consulting a map of the landmass they’re standing on and a geography teacher capable of explaining the concept of longitude to them.