HOW (SOME) AMERICANS THINK

A college professor I know was talking last night about a student she had in the 1980s. The student had been to France and had found the French unfriendly to Americans. Here's how the student put it: "They're so unpatriotic!"

This reminds me of something that happened when my wife and I were in Germany a few years ago. Many of the menus we saw at restaurants there were bilingual or multilingual, but at one restaurant in the Bavarian Alps the menu was (understandably) in German only. As we struggled with the menu and I sneaked furtive looks at my pocket German-English dictionary and German phrasebook, we heard an American-accented voice voice from another table: "Do you have a regular menu?"