What's Your Nationality?

[Yklikt]

What crime did she commit?

That sounds racist

[Peelee]

That sounds racist

Just in case you're serious, I was making a joke about the Brits using Australia as a penal colony back in the day.

[Yklikt]

Just in case you're serious, I was making a joke about the Brits using Australia as a penal colony back in the day.

Oh. I see.

[Cicciograna]

Count another Italian here, even though I live in the US now, and I don't think I'll go back to Italy, so I'll probably give rise to the American branch of my family, I guess.
Pretty proud of my neapolitan roots...even though they are not the purest: a branch of my ancestors comes from Spain.

Some years ago I was tallying all the italians on this forum, and sorta created a Facebook group to keep in contact.

[Peelee]

Count another Italian here, even though I live in the US now, and I don't think I'll go back to Italy, so I'll probably give rise to the American branch of my family, I guess.
Pretty proud of my neapolitan roots...even though they are not the purest: a branch of my ancestors comes from Spain.

Some years ago I was tallying all the italians on this forum, and sorta created a Facebook group to keep in contact.

I love Italians.

Spoiler: Irrelevant story on Italians being awesome

Show

So, back in the early aughts, my dad died rather suddenly and unexpectedly. My grandfathers died before my parents had even met, one grandmother died when I was still a toddler, and my last grandmother had died three years before my dad, but she was in Austria and I'd only met her a couple times when I was really young. So I'd never really had much experience with death of family members, and one of the things I didn't expect but apparently is a thing is that friends will drop everything and come from all around to bring food. And since this was a pretty surprising event, some tried to cook up a quick dish, but a lot of people brought things like Arby's or other takeout. Totally understandable (especially since I'm pretty sure a lot of them never cooked to begin with and mostly ate out).

Well, there was one family that we were very close with - my parents were good friends with their parents, my brother was good friends with one of their kids about the same age, i was friends with two of their daughters about my same age, so we did a lot of things together and were family friends in several ways. The parents were both American-born, but pureblooded Italian, and the grandparents had immigrated from Italy. The parents were both professionals - one was a neurosurgeon, the other was a news reporter, and they were both indisposed at the time, so the grandmother took it upon herself to come on behalf of the family.

She shows up with this massive lasagna, and it looks just gorgeous. Far better than anything I've seen in any restaurant, smells like heaven itself, meat and cheese just exploding out of it. And the grandmother, she looks absolutely mortified. She's almost sobbing, hanging her head in shame, just keeps saying apologizing in her thickly accented English, practically begging us to absolve her of the horrendous grievance she dared visit upon us. Because, with the suddenness of it all, she didn't have time to make her own noodles, and had to resort to store-bought.

I loved that sweet old lady.

[Gwynfrid]

As opposed to almost everyone in the rest of France, who in my experience will insist on making clear they're not Parisian.

Here's a Frenchman to confirm this.

On top of that, a very large percentage of Parisians will actually tell you something along the lines of, "I live in Paris but I'm actually from X", X being whatever region their family comes from.

Regarding the notion of "nationality", the French will equate it with citizenship. It's interesting to see the various views on that term, as expressed on this thread. Of course, France sees itself as just one nation, as compared to the UK (as in, the Six Nations Championship for example).

[SaintRidley]

It's even weirder than that.

During the American Civil War of the 1860's, they were claims that the Confederates had "Norman" ancestors which were superior to the "Saxon" ancestors of the "Yankees".

People is crazy.

Post Civil War the South switched its mythology to sympathizing with the conquered Saxons and viewing the North as oppressive to their culture like the Normans were.

Weird, right? It's that Lost Cause crap and an unwillingness to admit that maybe the South's culture of owning people based on race was wrong and not worth fighting for after all.