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I encountered a fellow American online who was insisting, in apparent good faith, that there is no such thing as a person anywhere in the world who doesn’t recognize the names of all 50 US states as easily as they recognize France or China, and so there’s never any need to clarify that you mean in the US.

My fellow Americans, that is not true. When people here in Europe ask where I’m from, and I say Massachusetts rather than Boston, 80% of the time I can visibly see the gears turning as they try to decide whether I just made up that word to mess with them. Nobody is talking about Massachusetts on the Estonian or the Nepalese news. Nobody outside of the US has ever massed a chusetts and they never will.