I've pretended not to speak English to avoid talking to strangers in queues before (but more than once it's backfired and they've launched into some sort of crazed racist tirade about fucking foreigners who don't even speak fucking English, which is still probably better than the conversation they were planning before…

Even in Iceland!

Everything British people do is fancy.

YES. I was finding this article fascinating until I got to the "I am so sick and fucking tired of foreigners" bit. I'll just fuck off back to foreign land now, I suppose. Bloody hell.

I just got 24. Holy moly.

That cracked me up, too.

This is literally the first time I've ever heard them being a thing at all. Perhaps where you are it's an ethnicity-specific thing but here it isn't? Or maybe here it is too but I'm just totally unaware of it? To me they're just those annoying little hairs that I and lots of other girls have.

An Instagram hashtag was brilliant for our wedding. We woke up the next day and could easily see all our friends' pictures from the wedding without having to check each of their accounts individually.

Waking up the morning after our wedding and instantly reliving the whole day through our friends pictures (handily gathered together via a hashtag on Instagram) was WONDERFUL. I loved it, and many friends said they loved using it to see everyone else's shots, too. I really doubt "the public" gave a fuck.

You make so much more sense than this article!

I absolutely thought two marines were married and that was a nice picture of them, and then Mr Marine quit and Mrs Marine got pregnant and disappeared. Now that I know there are *two* Mr Marines and are the wives also marines? I can't figure it out. And WHO IS IN THE PICTURE?

Eyebrow Lady is also "happy, smiling woman hiker standing next to lake"!!! The eyebrows remain the same.

I'd imagine it's the legal differences between the UK and US.

I'm sort of honorary half American now apparently, and I just end up saying "Asian" for everyone all the time, which causes confusion in both countries. Luckily it just doesn't come up in conversation all that much!

Tons of people are horrifically racist in England, yes.

I do know it's a subcontinent, but the whole rest of the continent's still "Asia" so it makes no sense that we (here, in England) were using "Asian" to mean *only* that subcontinent — craziness! And then I was never entirely sure what Americans would say when we would say "Asian"… someone told me "We just say…

Ha! Yes, I was newly arrived in the US so didn't know any of the good or bad words for lots of things, and would take great delight in calling home to update my friends on my newly acquired American knowledge. Telling my friend she wasn't supposed to call herself Oriental anymore was a memorable one.

Obviously I'm not proud of being ignorant, and I'm not entirely sure where you're seeing pride; I've had to learn that no one can know everything, though (perhaps you're an exception to that, in which case — massive congrats!) If a topic doesn't come up in conversation in my life for a decade then there may well have…

Yeah, it makes no logical sense to use the name of an entire continent, does it? (And I'm always bewildered because the illogical word illogically means two illogically different things depending on with which of my circles I'm talking!)

Perhaps I am, and my friends and family and colleagues too. And in the grand scheme of things, not knowing everything about everything is fine with me.