Andrei S. Markovits

“A colleague of mine who has now been a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, for more than two decades told me that she grew up in Kaiserslautern and learned English from American GIs. Instead of being rewarded for her knowledge of the language, her secondary school teacher, who knew far less English than this little girl, gave her nothing but bad grades because she “didn’t speak proper English, just American dialect.” As stated in the preface, I had virtually the identical experience at the prestigious secondary school, the Theresianische Akademie, that I attended in Vienna in the 1960s, even though I was fortunate enough—unlike my colleague from Kaiserslautern and Trinity—to get straight A’s in English in spite of my inferior “American dialect,” my “faulty” American spelling, and after being reminded virtually on a daily basis that “in a prestigious institution such as ours, where we educate Austria’s elites, we do not talk American, do not walk American, do not look American because we are not in the Wild West but in a civilized place.” Italian elites also regularly refer to American English as a dialect that they view as inferior to British English.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“In massive contrast to the negative and pejorative—at best ambivalent—notions that the word “American” conjures up in Europe, “European” invariably invokes positive tropes among Americans (elites and mass alike), such as “quality,” “class,” “taste,” and “elegance,” be it in food, comfort, tradition, romance, or eroticism (as in European massage, European decor, European looks . . . and the list can go on and on). Every Madison Avenue ad agency knows full well that the best way to sell quality and rare curiosities to American elites is to conjure up European associations.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America