notyou2 wrote:Dukasaur wrote:notyou2 wrote:
There was also Upper and Lower Canada. Upper Canada became Ontario, and Lower Canada became Quebec, which are actually reversed when you look at a map, Quebec being up and Ontario being down. So we had misnomers as well.
It's not a misnomer. Upper and Lower Canada has nothing to do with North and South. Upper Canada was Upper because it was the highlands, up the river (the St. Lawrence RIver) and Lower Canada was Lower because it was the lowlands, down toward the mouth of the river. In a time when virtually all commerce had to move either upriver or downriver, it was far more significant to identify which way was up than which way was north.
It's a matter of perspective Duk. I was talking about the "midwest" and looking at a map. When looking at a map, lower Canada is UP and upper Canada is DOWN.
I honestly thought you would understand that. I wasn't reasoning why it was such, I know why. Now go prattle somewhere else.
I know what you were talking about. You were insulting Americans because the popular names of their regions don't conform to the relative geometric positions of the land, basically calling them stupid, and then when called on it you tried to soften the insult by saying they're not the only stupid ones, that we're stupid too and also have regions not based the relative geometric positions of the land. That, in a nutshell, was what you were saying.
I'm calling bullshit on your whole thread from start to finish. The Americans are not stupid because they don't redistribute the names of their regions on a relatively unimportant thing like the precise geometric layout of the states. The regions are named after broad cultural, historical, and commercial patterns and make sense based on those patterns. These things matter a lot more to the people in the region than measurements of land area. The five states of the Northwest are enormous in land area, but tiny in population, and all five of them combined don't have as many Congressional districts as Pennsylvania or Illinois. If you add in the Dakotas, the northwest just
baaaarely passes Pennsylvania and Illinois. Thus, although the Dakotas might be about halfway across the U.S. in terms of geographic distance, they are not halfway across in demographic, economic, political or social terms. In those, the halfway point is probably on a line with Cincinnati.
Similarly, Canadians are not stupid because they didn't name Upper and Lower Canada about compass direction. They were named after the direction up or down the St. Lawrence River, Canada's main trade route at the time, and a matter far more important to the people than looking at a compass.
Before you start insulting people and implying that they're stupid because they didn't name something after some arbitrary standard, you might pause and reflect that they named it after something which is or was more functionally important to them.
