Comment by loloquwowndueo
13 hours ago
Older than the United States hahaha.
Remember the saying : in the US, 100 years is a long time; in Europe, 100km is a long distance.
13 hours ago
Older than the United States hahaha.
Remember the saying : in the US, 100 years is a long time; in Europe, 100km is a long distance.
How pedantic can we be? There are a number of countries in Europe younger than the United States...
But far fewer than modern nation states that are younger. E.g. Norway as a modern nation state is typically dated to either 1814 (constitution), or 1905 (independence), but the country is considered to have been united between 872 and ~1130 depending on exactly how consolidated control you're willing to count.
And we europeans consider them young. What we are pointing is that people in US (and America in general) talks about pre-1776 stuff as they were prehistoric, and pre-1900 stuff as they were comparable to Roman ruins. Add to that that we love to bomb each other to a ruble, and buildings and countries younger than 200 years are viewed as temporary stuff. Nothing pedantic or snobby here, just pointing that we live in different scenarios that affected our views.
It’s more like US people look at a couple 100yo buildings and say stuff like “wow this place has a lot of history!”
> It’s more like US people look at a couple 100yo buildings and say stuff like “wow this place has a lot of history!”
You are overgeneralizing. In much of Europe plenty of architecture was erected after 1945, and most of architecture around and after 1900.
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It's still pretty long in the US. Over an hour by car, and even for people who bicycle regularly riding a century is no joke.
By that same sort of metric, 100 years is a long time in Europe, too. Not too many people live that long.
Didn't expect folks to take a fact statement as an attack.
The point was to emphasize the longevity of some animals, as for us humans the US constitution is 8/9 generations away.
Isn't the USA older then pretty much every country in Europe? Maybe the UK could be considered older depending on how you count it and San Marino is there but all the other major ones like Germany, Italy, France, Spain, etc aren't even 100.
How in the world can you claim that France is not even 100? The German empire was established in 1857, which is definitely more than 100 years ago; it's also not unreasonable to say that the HRE could be equated to the German state, that Spain is the continuation of Castille, and that the Roman empire can be considered the direct precursor to Italy
There's a cultural through line for all these countries, often stretching back thousands of years, which means that they reach further back than the definition of the modern state
Perhaps they referenced a source that only considers the French Fifth Republic as “France”? That would give it an age of 68.
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If you're gonna give them credit for stuff like that, then you need to at least give credit to the United States as far back as the Pilgrims in the 1600s.
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Sweden would like a word...
My Dad has a vacuum cleaner that is older than USA
It's interesting how arrogant Europeans can be towards the U.S. when they themselves seeded the U.S.!