jueves, 24 de noviembre de 2016

Call me not my adjectives

—Are you going anywhere for holidays?
—Yeah, I'm going to the United.
—Oh, that is nice. Where will you go there?
—I'll spend some time with my parents in New. I'm so excited, I really want to see the thingy Of Liberty, Brooklyn and other places. Then we want to travel to other states, probably North, South, then through West to North and South.
—Aha...
—Then we will go to New and back to New. What about you?
—Oh, we haven't decided yet. My mother wants to go to New to visit her sister, but my father would prefer to visit his homeland in the United.
—Oh, that's great.
—Yeah, Great or the United, same thing.
—Where's he from?
—He's from upon-Avon. Anyway, I wanted to go to the Democratic for a fair project, but I will have to wait until next *

Lost? No wonder. It is confusing. It sounds stupid. So is it for us when some foreigners keep referring to some places in the Czech Republic using just the adjectives. České Budějovice is Bohemian Budweis, or Czech Budweis. There are only two cities called Budějovice in the country, but dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and/or villages called České, Česká, Český.

Today, someone was trying to convince me that it was correct to say České to refer to Budějovice because many, if not most, people said it. I said "Ok, so to start with, if most people in the world drink alcohol, are you going to? Would you start smoking just because most people would smoke? The fact that a majority does something stupid does not validate it." We could go beyond that: would you like to be called something that is not your name, but an adjective? It is your choice. Back to that within some lines...

It gets even worse: there is an implicit refusal to adapt to the uses of the country you are living in if you refuse to call their cities the way they want. Feel free to do so. Just never complain if they are not friendly to you afterwards. I would not be.

If you are reading this and you think I'm "overdoing it as usual", let me know, so I can call you whatever comes to my mind to see what do you think of it after one week. Also, you'd better not say anything about migrants, because I'm very likely to kick your butt as strong as I can to see whether I can send you out of Europe. If you are not willing to adapt within Europe, you are not the example we want migrants to see when they arrive.

Oh, yes, I'm very upset. And I'm loving it: nothing puts me to write like getting upset.

And now the key to the names of the dialogue at the opening of this post.

United STATES, New YORK, N. CAROLINA, S. CAROLINA, W. VIRGINIA, N. DAKOTA, S. DAKOTA, N. JERSEY, N. YORK.

New ZEALAND, United KINGDOM, Great Britain, U. Kingdom, STRATFORD-upon-Avon, Dem. Republic of Congo, fair TRADE project, next YEAR.

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