As any fule kno, I yield to no man for the love of my adopted country. I am an American by choice, and doubleplusproud I am to be that.
However: there are three things peculiar to the U.S. that got up my nose soon after I arrived here, and they have continued to bug the hell out of me ever since.
1) Date format: I know that we can do pretty much anything we want because Murka, but FFS why do we insist on mm/dd/yy (or /yyyy ever since Y2K) when the rest of the world uses dd/mm/yyyy? It makes no sense, forces one to insert an unnecessary comma when writing out the date — e.g. November 19 COMMA 2024, to prevent numbers running into each other — when going with the universal format would just make things easier. For everybody.
2) Gallons: I have no problem with using Imperial weights and measures, because they make things easier for everyday life over the artificial metric system. But why the hell do we have a liquid gallon that is smaller than the Imperial gallon? I was looking at a lovely old car’s specs the other day, and saw that it had a “tiny” 15-gallon fuel tank — and then realized that it was a Jaguar, and they were quoting Imperial gallons (in this case 18 U.S. gallons). I mean, we don’t have a mile that’s shorter than an Imperial mile — we could just go metric for that, don’t get me started — so why a use a smaller gallon measure?
3) Floor numbers: When you step into an elevator / lift in any developed country outside the U.S., you see the selector thus:
…but in the U.S., it’s: 
Why no ground floor? Once again, it’s something we do that nobody else does, and it often leads to confusion when talking to a non-Murkin. FFS, every building has a floor that’s at ground-level, so why not use the “G” and say “ground floor”?
No doubt there are all sorts of sound reasons why we Murkins have gone our own way — and don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with that mindset, e.g.:
…but I do need to wave my hands when such non-conformity makes absolutely no sense at all.
In all three of the above cases.
...no link because eeek.
...that trannie thing just isn’t working for you, Nancy, is it?
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