So naturally I jumped right in when I saw that Business Insider had come up with a list of the rudest cities in the country
The article was replete with an attempt to robe itself in some sort of scientific rigor. The margin of error is 2%... And there's this caveat: Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet.
Well, yeah, "generally speaking", someone who took an online poll would tend to be someone with access to the internet. At least for that moment in time. That's just science.
Anyway, they ask respondents to pick their choices for the 5 rudest cities in the United States. Whatever that means. Then they state that the list they gave folks to choose from was of the 50 biggest cities. On that I will - not rudely at all - call BS. Providence and Hartford don't even crack the Top 100. And, may I point out - not rudely at all - that Worcester, Massachusetts, the Heart of the Commonwealth, is larger than both Providence and Hartford. So. There.
So, if you're heaving Providence and Hartford onto the list, why not Worcester? Is it because Worcester is the largest city that no one outside of New England has even heard of? (And even in New England, most people know it. What they don't know is that, after Boston, it's the region's largest city.) Can it be that Worcester would just not be considered rude by anyone in their right mind? Naahhh...
The number one pick? No surprise here. 34.3% of those surveys put New York in their Top Five Rudest. Coming in at #2? No surprise here, either. 19.7% gave Los Angeles the nod.
And why wouldn't these two cities grab the "honors"? They're the two largest cities in the country. Most people are familiar with them. A lot of people have visited them. Thus, more folks will have an opinion, one way or the other, in a way they might not have about Providence or Hartford (each of them was only listed by roughly one-and-a-half percent of those surveyed. Which is still something of a surprise. That many people had something to say about these two small cities?)
Plus rudeness is pretty much associated with large cities in a way that it's not with say, Mayberry NC, where one wouldn't expect that there'd be a lot of folks who would diss Aunt Bee for her fuddy-duddy church hats, make fun of Opie for being a ginger, or push and shove to get into a free chair at Floyd's barber shop.
Washington DC, although not that large a city, understandably made it's way onto the list as the third rudest American city. After all, across the spectrum, everyone seems to be hating on Washington DC, and it is at present home to the rudest person in the country.
Things fall back into place with Chicago, The
While one would expect such a large city to make its way high up on the list of rude cities, if only by dint of its size and its very urbanness, seeing a city from the Midwest called out is a bit of a shock to the system. Midwest nice and all that.
But I suppose when tourists from Podunk, Michigan find themselves jostled when they get to Chicago and start taking selfies in front of The Bean, they may find the city rude.
Boston, which came in at #5 (14.9% of respondents think we're rude), is, like Washington, DC, punching above its weight, population-wise. If they adjusted for population size, I'm guessing we'd notch ourselves up in the rankings a space or two.
Nonetheless, I'm completely gratified that people in general - at least surveyed people with access to the internet - consider Chicago ruder than Boston. As someone who's half-Chicago (my mother was from there) and has a lot of relatives in Chicagoland, I say "hah!" Not rudely, of course. Just "hah."
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