Hey all, curious to hear your experiences. If you've ever traveled or lived outside the US, what’s the funniest, weirdest, or most unexpected "Americanism" you heard someone use abroad?
For me, the best one was when I was in Melbourne, Australia. I was at a small cafe and overheard an Aussie guy trying to hype up his friend before a job interview. He goes, completely straight-faced, "You got this, man. Just go in there and sell yourself. Fake it till you make it." The delivery was very Aussie, but the phrase itself was peak American corporate energy.
It kind of caught me off guard because that exact phrase is something I’ve heard a million times back home, but hearing it halfway across the world made it weirdly funny and memorable.
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The mountains around Como Lago had ‘Pizza Americana.’ It was a wood fired pizza with slices of hot dogs and French fries topped with mayonnaise.
In Italy, burgers are usually aggressively marketed as “authentically American,” for some reason. I saw an AI generated ad for a new place on Instagram. The ad was in English and opened with some stereotypical (read: not realistic) biker dude fisting a massive burger into his mouth like a Carls Jr. ad from the mid 2000s.
Even the places that aren’t aggressive about it will have burgers with names like “smoky bacon,” or something.
It’s okay to make them your own! Hell, that’s what we did in the first place.
I was on a plane to a layover in France in 2011 and I remember hearing this French girl trying to sound presumably American and she said “swaggy boy”
In a suburb in Germany, population of ~50k. Eating at a restaurant with my fellow USA folk. Only one other group in the whole place, a German family. At the end of their dinner, we hear some commotion from our table across the room, followed by a chorus of voices saying “CHEEEEEEESE!”
They were taking a family photo :,) I’m not sure how common this is around the world, as this is the only time I’ve ever heard it outside of the States.
I don’t know that this is what you’re asking for exactly, but I was walking around Inverness, Scotland after dinner one evening in 2018, and from down the street I heard… “Rhinestone Cowboy?” Yep, it was the patrons of the Gunsmith Bar drowning out the jukebox.
About ten days later, I’m walking around the old city in York, and as I get a little closer to the Three Cranes pub… yep, “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and everyone bellowing along. I was a bit puzzled, but you had to enjoy the enthusiasm.
In a restaurant in Belgium a family ordered Filet American. They brought out a (jello molded) plate of raw hamburger mixed with some chopped onions and celery. The whole family gleefully cut slices off and relished their meal. Not like anything we Americans had ever eaten. A different restaurant they had bulky type rolls with raw hamburger. I know about steak tartar but it’s not an American thing.
Was in aberdeen and a waffle place was advertising american waffles and they were basically cake just filled with sugar and cinnamon in a waffle shape
I spent 3 years as a teenage Navy brat in Naples, Italy. It wasn’t really an americanism but we all talked about going back to the land of round doorknobs. Most household doors back then in that region were the push down handle type.
On the flip side, my most memorable “Americanism” happened while visiting London in 2003. We were walking from the tube to Kew Gardens behind a family with two young boys who were playing with toy plastic soldiers, saying “bang! bang!” “missed me!”. After a minute or so one of them said, “Ha, got you! I win!” The brother sadly agreed and replied, “Okay, but next time I get to be the Americans. They kill everybody.”
BBQ sauce in Northern Europe is aggressively marketed with American flag imagery, the old west and cowboys. To the point where a commercial could have a cowboy kick open a saloon door, chug sauce from a bottle, spit out some empty shells and proclaim, “mmmm, tastes like guns” and it would barely register as weird.
I wound up at an America-themed burger place on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. The mixture of vintage US kitsch and a drunken Scot loudly telling his companion to pursue a career in SEXUAL HEALTH NURSING was a little surreal. (Not that there’s anything *wrong* with sexual health nursing.)
In 2004 I visited the capital of Taiwan (Taipei). All signs and such were written in calligraphy (Chinese characters) and an english alphabet version. Menus at restaurants involved help from friends or me pointing at pictures. But the real americanism was that every store would have a random sign in the window that said “sale” even though there was no such sale going on in the store
A Swedish guy in France angrily declaring that it was ridiculous how many people don’t speak English and it made no sense because it’s “the language of travel” I’m not sure it’s exactly an Americanism, but I remember thinking “Oh my god if I said that I would get absolutely raked over the coals” lmao.
I was in Montreal once and I overheard some construction workers chatting in French and one of them said “C’est bon bro”, which was very funny to me. Bro feels so American so to hear it said at the end of a sentence in a foreign languages is striking.
Another time in Paris at a burger place they sent over the guy who spoke English and he was super animated and excited and went “yo, wassup, hang ten!” and then explained the menu, probably said some more stuff I can’t remember, it was a lot. Good burger though.
Was in Peace Corps in a small town in Africa with a sundry store. In that store was a Shake ‘n Bake equivalent call Southern Fried Chicken mix. Pretty sure I was the only person in a 10 km (6 mi) radius who understood where the term “Southern Fried Chicken” came from, as it wasn’t from the south of that country.
When I was teaching English in South Korea we were walking home through a busy shopping and restaurant area. “We” was a group of visibly western looking people, and we passed a group of teen girls. Upon seeing us one of the girls started imitating American English while actually speaking nonsense, but it caught our ears as familiar enough sounds that a few members of our group paused thinking she might be trying to talk to us. The girls were super embarrassed and giggling, but we thought it was hilarious and would have loved for her to continue.
“Guten Tag, y’all” with a Texas drawl while in Germany
When I was in Australia, I met a couple that was fascinated with my accent. They kept wanting me to repeat “shrimp on the barbie.” It’s an *American* dish that got popularized in Australia some time ago. Australians actually say prawns, and barbie is referring to barbecue. The part that was funny to me is that they kept asking me to say the phrase with my attempt at an Aussie accent 😂
We told an acquaintance in Denmark we were from Virginia, and he said he thought everyone in Virginia were toothless yokels.
Not really an Americanism per se, but the amount of “California” branded clothing in some countries is pretty funny. My daughter and I were in Bosnia and it was over the top….often getting some aspect of California all wrong too, for instance a tshirt might say “California! The Sunshine State!” We saw it a lot in Japan too.
I personally like how the word “okay” has spread throughout the entire world. It feels like you can go up to anyone and they’ll know what it means.
Relaxing in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, there’s a bunch of American’s having a beer and joking about, then I hear “…well you know what they say, happy wife, happy life!”
Edinburgh about 10 years ago. On the TV in the hotel I was staying in I saw an ad for “American style” refrigerators – basically just bigger refrigerators. I had never really thought about it before but I kept thinking “huh, we do have pretty large refrigerators by comparison”. Made me laugh.
I was sitting in a bar in Saigon when out of the blue I heard someone yell, “Michigan sucks!” As the only white dude in the place, that really caught my attention
A Vietnamese Ohio State graduate saw my UM hat and let me know their feelings. We shared a big laugh over the, uh, cultural exchange
I think my favorite has to be the random English words and phrases on clothing, often seen in parts of Asia.
I once saw a girl in Japan wearing a jacket that said “Rebel skinhead”
I’m just like “I don’t know what you think that means, but I know for a fact that does not mean what you think it means”
Not sure this is quite on target but once traveling in Brussels I was talking to a local at a restaurant and he asked where I was from. I said Texas and he immediately seem impressed and asked how many “acres and head of cows” I had. I responded cattle? He said yeah. Had to disappoint him saying I lived in a suburb of Fort Worth in a small house.