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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

“There’s not anything like this in the world,” said Corey Casey, Caltrans’ project manager for the shed.

Is there a word for the phenomenon that Americans will just always claim something they do is the worlds best / biggest / most unique until essentially proven otherwise.

How would anyone come to the conclusion that this is a new thing unique to California?

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So fun fact, when learning Chinese I always thought it was weird that America gets to be “meiguo” beautiful country. Like how would the Chinese know America was beautiful, maybe the Americans described their own country this way? Or is mei guo just a rough cognate for Meri-Ca ?

But later I found a footnote that suggested the use of mei here is reflexive, in meiguoren, “people who find themselves to be beautiful” and that makes a lot more sense to me :)

Exceptionalism.

Revenge for Pavel Chekov claiming in Star Trek that Whisky, among other things, was a Russian invention. It was his running gag that Russia did it either first or best.

The USSR used to claim that Russia had invented everything (India often does the same). In some cases they did have a genuine claim. There were certainly pioneers of rocketry and aviation in the Russian Empire who were overlooked in the west.

The joke in the films about Shakespeare sounding better in the original Klingon came from people who claimed Shakespeare was a German. (Colonel Gaddafi claimed Shakespeare was an Arabic called Sheikh Zubair.)

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