Size Matters

When you return to America after a long hiatus, you feel like you have shrunk, because there is no place in the world where all the objects around you are as large as in the fifty, nifty, thrifty, and colossal United States. I shared this insight recently with the handful of German teenagers who have a love of language or a sense of pragmatism and show up Friday afternoons at school for the English conversation practice I offer.

Actually, I shouldn't say "insight," because America's love affair with larger- than- life qualifies as known wisdom. The country's vast plateau still captures the imagination as the land of ever- expanding frontiers. And inspires justifiable disgust with its bulky cars, mammoth houses, and shopping centers the size of small countries.

Since I don't like to spend long hours recounting ideas that other people have articulated better, I posed a new question to my students: what objects, (anything that you can touch), are smaller in America than in Germany? Silence. So I changed the conversation back to what everyone had planned for the weekend. But five minutes into the chatter about a drunken rampage at a party the previous weekend, I got a nagging feeling not to let the thread of the original conversation die so easily. "Come on, guys, I know most of you haven't been there, but you learned that there was an America before you learned to talk."

"Carrots," said Isabelle.

"Carrots?" I asked. "Our carrots look just like your carrots."

"You have mini carrots."

"Oh, those." I didn't know whether to be offended or bemused. "You mean the ones shaped like fingers?" (How did she think they get like that?)

"Yes," she said, "these."

"But that's a marketing tactic. They're cut like that. It gets kids to eat them." You can also buy them before they go under the knife. America is the land of the strange, but let's not exaggerate.

After that our conversation stalled again, so I gave up and waited to try the question out at home on my globe-trotting friends, the anthropologists and geographers in Heidelberg. Here's the list that we came up with (comparison US/Germany). Please add your ideas.

• churches (store-front neighborhood church v. gothic cathedral)
• chocolate bars (300 g bars are not unusual in Germany - by God, that's nearly a pound!)
• the first letter of nouns, "size" or length of words in general
• high school teachers' shoulder bags (because teachers move from classroom to classroom in Germany)