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One time I was talking to somebody in NYC and they called Colorado the “west coast,” and I looked at them with the dry death stare one acquires growing up in the Mountain West and said, “The distance from Denver to LA is greater than the distance from Chicago to NYC,” and I’ve never seen someone come that close to physically reproducing the exploding head emoji.
(For those genuinely puzzled by the above but afraid to ask: Colorado is the West, not the West Coast.)
Genuinely curious: where does the self-identification line shift?
Do folks in Sacramento think of themselves as living on the “West Coast?” What about near Yosemite? Reno?
@inthehands As a native Coloradan I am still salty about the summer camp kids in Minnesota who informed me that Colorado was not "western" but that California was. Validation, at long last.
@whetstone
As a Coloradan who lives in Minnesota, I can say with confidence that most of the lovely Midwesterners here have absolutely no clue where or what the West is.
@inthehands @whetstone
My friend from Seattle laughed that people used the term "Midwest". It's not west at all. It's the middle of the country He would also dispute Colorado being "The West" Texas, too. They are in the middle of the country.
@Okanogen @whetstone
These terms are of course situated relative to history, not geography. The Midwest was exactly that from the point of view of European descendants who had colonized only what we would now call the East Coast.
But if we are going with raw geography, Colorado is most certainly in the western half of the lower 48.
@inthehands @Okanogen “midwest” is no more nonsensical than “the middle east”
just tells you something about the perspective from which the naming originated
@whetstone @Okanogen
Indeed. Edward Said wrote a whole book (Orientalism) with this observation as its cornerstone!