Regional stereotypes are very weird. I never have the slightest idea of what people even mean by them. They sound like they are spoken in code. Yesterday at the Christmas Eve dinner, for instance, I mentioned that I had lived on the East Coast for several years.
“The East Coast!” one woman exclaimed. “People are very rushed there.”
“Yes, very rushed!” another guest said. Everybody looked at me for confirmation.
“Rushed?” I asked, unsure of what people were trying to communicate to me.
“Yes, rushed,” one guest explained, probably thinking that my English was a little limited. “You know, rushing, running around all the time, always in a hurry.”
Everybody looked at me in eager anticipation.
I realized that people would not settle down until I confirmed this vision of rushing East Coast folks. These days, whenever I go to a social gathering, somebody always announces, “She has a PhD! From Yale! And a bunch of other degrees! And she speaks many languages! And she has lived in different countries! And she recently got a prize for her book!” After that, people look at me like I’m an oracle, speak in hushed voices whenever I enter a room, and check every statement they make against my reaction. This makes it absolutely impossible for me to contradict anything anybody says because that might carry an inordinate weight and hurt feelings. So, of course, I said, “Yes, they sometimes rush.”
To me this stereotype is extremely weird because it seems completely random and meaningless. If people were to say that East Coasters are stuck up and condescending, I would not agree with that but I’d know where this idea comes from. Rushing East Coasters, however, make zero sense.
The same thing happens with other regional stereotypes. Every time I meet a man from a Southern state, he tells me, “Well, you know what they say about Southern men!”
“What do they say?” I ask.
This invariably makes my interlocutor look confused and upset. After a lot of verbal wrangling, I usually manage to make him reveal something along the lines of, “Well, Southern men, we are not like other men, we are gentlemen.” The a new struggle over what it means to be a Southern gentleman ensues.
I have come to realize that a regional stereotype is not supposed to conceal any meaning. Its entire point is to give people a chance to say, “Oh, those Southerners / Midwesterners / East Coasters, etc., you know what they are like!” The statement means the exact opposite of what it says, namely, “I have no idea what they are like, and I don’t care to find out.”
Clarissa's Blog 
I know what you mean! I’m from the West Coast originally, and soooo many people asked me if the East Coast was very different, including the rushing stereotype. And I never really noticed everything different. Maybe because I was always with other academics and that culture is fairly homogenous across the country? NYC definitely tires me out – but that’s because I go there so rarely that I try and squeeze in a million different things with a million different people, nothing inherent to NYC. Very puzzling.
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If you find the regional stereotypes game to be a bit harrowing, try the international stereotypes game, where you can lose before you’ve even tried to win!
“You sound British!”
“You sound Canadian!”
“You sound Australian!”
“I can’t place the accent … are you Belgian?”
“Are you perhaps German?”
“You look like my Dutch friend …”
“You speak Swedish like a German …”
“You speak French like a Northern African …”
“You speak Spanish like a Cuban …”
“Is that Finnish you’re speaking?”
Perkele. 🙂
No, no, really, I’m The Doctor, and my Tardis is malfunctioning just a bit — let me zap it with a Comedic Screwdriver, just so I can sound just a bit funnier …
“Alla dina baserar är tillhörde oss!” *spoken in a Dalek’s voice*
I should really get that fixed … 🙂
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Interesting about the regional stereotypes thing, I’m from New Jersey which has some very negative stereotypes attached to it due to shows like The Sopranos and Jersey Shore, among other things. People from the rest of the country seem to think that we’re all assholes with terrible accents, fake tanned, wear a lot of bling, low-class Italian or Puerto Rican or some other type of ethnic and know someone in the Mafia. At least people from NYC can be seen as sophisticated and interesting, us Jersey folks are just low-class, fake tanned Guidos 😉
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As far as I can tell, you have lived in two regions: Midwest and East Coast. Have you noticed any major differences? I have lived on the West Coast and in the Miwest (three states in all….though, of course, i have visited many more.) And I have to say that I don’t notice many regoinal/state differences. I think social/educational/economic status trumps region here. In other words, an academic from Iowa is more or less like an academic from Lousiana who is more or less like an academic from Oregon. On the other hand, a blue collar worker from California is more or less like a blue collar workr from Indiana etc etc. Differences persist even within a socio-economic/educational class of course. But to me, class and particularly educational background really seems to define American identity.
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When I think about differences between Midwest ad East Coast, what comes to mind is geography and climate. I’ve met more hard-core religious people in the Midwest but I’m wary of generalizing too much based on my personal experiences.
“Differences persist even within a socio-economic/educational class of course. But to me, class and particularly educational background really seems to define American identity.”
– Yes, I agree completely.
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Stereotypes often have some grain of truth, the problem being that the truth is then distorted and generalized. I agree with the above statement that class and education often make for greater similarities than does region. But I do notice differences in communication and affect. When I moved from DC to a small, academically oriented city the South, I find myself having a lot of unpleasant encounters with people. My communication in DC was brusque, perhaps perceived as demanding and commanding here, with not enough of the Southern niceties that would have been considered time wasters in DC. So, the differences wasn’t in meaning or intent but in the particular discourse communities I was living in. I’ve adapted. At first, it felt both uncomfortable and unnatural. Since then, I find it’s just a different style, one that actually is more pleasant to me now,
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When people think of the East Coast as folks rushing around in a hurry, they’re probably thinking specifically about New York City. In NYC, people talk and walk and do everything FAST!. Hence the saying “quick as a New York minute.”
Some of these references are actually paradoxical. In urban areas on the East Coast, you might think that traffic must be going very fast during “rush hour,” when in fact traffic in rush hour is crawling along bumper to bumper.
It is true that in the South, they have this ideal of the Southern lady and the Southern gentleman. And of course, there’s “Southern hospitality.”
In general, differences between the North and South are all too real. Remember, we once had a bloody Civil War.
African-Americans used to say, “In the South, you can get close, but you can’t get high. In the North, you can get high, but you can’t get close.” Those two sentences were as good as a thick book on the difference between North and South.
Now, if you want to really insult some state or region in the U.S., you could say, “It has Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency.” This is very serious stuff.
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“Now, if you want to really insult some state or region in the U.S., you could say, “It has Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency.” This is very serious stuff.”
– This is the best. 🙂 🙂
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