I know.
I fucking know.
I shouldn't have to.
But I know.
Shhhh.
- he/him
- press.invincible.ink/
I'm Talen! I make videos and articles and games and graphic designs and guides and messes and encouragement. Chances are you can find anything I do on my blog. I like it when you comment on my things, so please do!
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in reply to @TalenLee's post:
half of the geographic terms are from before the entire west half of that was part of the country, and then none of those terms were ever changed just new terms layered on top
nobody knows where the midwest is. it's more like "middle". we can't have a mideast because there's already a middle east and we're at war with it
in reply to @TalenLee's post:
There's a lot to dislike about America, to be perfectly fair
(Idk if I’m missing a level of irony or not but) generally you’d say Gulf coast to distinguish from the Atlantic coast, which “east coast” is a shorthand for
So the US as a country started in the Northeast with the first 13 colonies. It stopped at the Appalachian mountains to the west and Virginia to the south. Everything past that was French or Iroquois owned. So that region is the "east coast of the US" because the other parts of the east coast weren't the US yet.
After the Louisiana purchase and war with the Iroquois confederation, the US expanded westward to the Rockies and plains. You can see the old border as this mostly smooth line running on the western edge of Minnesota down to Louisiana, before everything just becomes Squares. So for a while that west the western edge of the country, so the "Mid-west" was the middle of the western part of the country at the time. This is also why "Northwest university" is in Illinois. That was the northwestern most part of the country.
Then the US went to war with the Lakota and other plains nations and went to war with Mexico and conquered everything all the way to the pacific coast through ""manifest destiny"" and that become the west-coast, but the old names for the regions based on the old borders stuck around since by that point it had been like, over a century of calling these places by those names.
Also the gulf coast isn't the east coast because the coast is facing south. that's the gulf coast, the south coast, it's a different coast, it's not facing east, it doesn't count. but also the southeast (just called "the south" because originally there was not "southwest" to contrast it to, so the name stuck) isn't the "East coast" because it "wasn't america" when the "east coast" became the "east coast."
so basically as you go from older colonies to newer colonies the names reflect older and older maps of US territories when it comes to cardinal direction references
Me being a Brit and knowing absolutely nothing of what's going on 😀