Am I allowed to be confuzzled by the idea that people in the U.S. of European extraction who have no real identification with a European culture have no culture? My (adoptive) family is like eight different kinds of European, and the most recent immigration was in the 1860's. Most of my family got here before the Revolutionary War. Other than being German in the same way that everyone in Cincinnati is German, our heritage is pretty much just "white U.S." We'd be WASPs except that we're Catholic.
But that's not "no culture." My culture is baseball and superhero comics and hamburgers and the 4th of July. My culture is also southern Ohio, which means shades of Kentucky and West Virginia (my bio family is mostly from WV). It's gliding short a's, so that "can" and "cabagge" sound different from "cat." It's a slight twang when we get in our cups, and never saying "y'all" in Cincinnati but definitely saying it elsewhere. It's saying, "please?" to mean, "sorry, could you repeat that?" It's U.S. Catholicism and "Hail Mary" in Latin. It's a culture.
no subject
But that's not "no culture." My culture is baseball and superhero comics and hamburgers and the 4th of July. My culture is also southern Ohio, which means shades of Kentucky and West Virginia (my bio family is mostly from WV). It's gliding short a's, so that "can" and "cabagge" sound different from "cat." It's a slight twang when we get in our cups, and never saying "y'all" in Cincinnati but definitely saying it elsewhere. It's saying, "please?" to mean, "sorry, could you repeat that?" It's U.S. Catholicism and "Hail Mary" in Latin. It's a culture.