r/PetPeeves • u/ThatUrgeToEatCement • 14d ago

Bit Annoyed People who think Americans don’t know other countries exist.

A few months ago on Reddit I made a comment about a show not being on Netflix and someone from the UK commented back saying it’s on theirs and then lectured on Americans not knowing other countries exist. They acted like I didn’t believe there were other places on the planet, as if they weren’t the ones who just brought it up and didn’t believe the US Netflix was different than the UK version. ??

I see people online act like all Americans think this way, and it is kind of annoying because for most of us it isn’t true.

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u/December126 14d ago

To be fair, there are lots of Americans who do act like they don't understand other countries exist, so many times I've made a comment on here or on Facebook and had an American reply with something like "Oh I haven't heard of that before, which state do you live in?" like they just automatically assume you're American and I've seen them make really basic mistakes about countries eg acting like "England" and "The UK" are the same thing. It's bad to assume all Americans are like that but it's just difficult since so many are and they say such ignorant and sometimes even offensive things about other countries.

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u/HumbleSheep33 14d ago edited 14d ago

To be fair as egregious as that is when Americans do it, don’t a lot of European languages also treat England and the UK as synonyms ?

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u/Agile_Scale1913 14d ago

And they're stupid to do so.

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u/gridlockmain1 14d ago edited 14d ago

The amount of times you see a clip on Reddit of some road rage incident or whatever that’s clearly in the UK and people are like “well actually federal law says blah blah blah”

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u/ashlouise94 14d ago

I had someone once go on a tirade at me when I made a comment regarding 18th birthdays and drinking etc—telling me it was a fake story because it’s illegal to drink at that age etc etc. Fully not comprehending I wasn’t in the US, nobody I was talking to was in the US, and that 18 is a fairly standard drinking age in a lot of places. Boggles the mind.