These old American phrases bring me on to my next point the language, this is one of the most important aspects of American culture and after reading the stories we begin to understand it, for example in the story ‘A Couple Of Hamburgers’ words such as ‘diner’ and ‘dog-wagon’ are used instead of ‘cafes’ which is what we would call them. In the days of pioneers words seemed to be abbreviated and after watching the film the way they were wrote was the way they said them for example goin’ and sniffin’. After reading the story My Father I found that words ending with ’g’ or began with ‘th’ were abbreviated the most. These words are what made America’s language different to other countries and is what makes it an important aspect of American culture. Since then it has changed slightly as many more slang words are being used.
The appearance and personality of an American person was much different to what it is now. There physical status was different; this is because there weren’t any machines around at the time to do the work for them. I feel this type of lifestyle I think affected the status of women quiet a lot as I found out when I read the stories, especially in ‘My Father’, the women seemed to be a lot more independent and seemed to have more control over the men. Whereas nowadays women follow after men and don’t have to do, as many physical jobs like they used to. The women in my father Elen was born after the world of pioneers and her parents weren’t pioneers they grew Elen up in a normal modern state, this reflected in the story, as she didn’t have any respect for the old pioneer in the story. She sets up a group who think that they should forget about the American West’s history. I also found out that they were much more tougher and stronger.
A normal person wore much different clothes to what they wear now for example a woman would wear long skirts and did a lot of looking after the children and other chores. When I watched the film I noticed that the population was split into what seemed two different classes the rich and poor. The rich wore colourful clothes and were treated very well whilst the lower class had to tend for themselves. The way they acted was peculiar because they occupied themselves in different ways, as there was no technology to amuse themselves with, for example they may fiddle with bits of wood as seen on a western film. People used to be much more tougher and stronger as there would have been a lot more physical work to do because they didn’t have any technology to do the work for them. The technology plays an important aspect of America’s culture nowadays but back then there was hardly any technology and the first signs of technology were the train, which affected the lifestyle completely and was the start of something that changed America.
When we watched a typical American western film I realized how tough it was for a pioneer to succeed in their life. They weren’t able to walk down to a shop and buy food; no they had to grow it themselves. There were vast stretches of flat, bare and sandy pieces of land with little vegetation. This made it difficult to find a good enough area near water to settle and have a fairly good lifestyle. Houses were made out of natural materials such as wood. But as time has passed and technology has improved things have changed buildings are now made from other materials, as it is cheaper, also the range of clothes has changed as more materials have been recognized for making clothes. We read some short stories and tried to find out if any of them gave us any more information on American culture. The word culture is a certain way of life of a society; it embraces many different aspects of life such as language, music and history. The first story we read was called ‘A couple of
