Quote:
Originally Posted by Ch.G, Ch.G
At the risk of steering this ship further off topic: I've had similar experiences with friends who had never been to the city. One dude gazed out at the lake for the first time and remarked, "I thought you'd be able to see to the other side?!" (...a real idiot, that one, but I hear this is a depressingly common exclamation among first-time visitors. I guess "lake" sounds quaint? Perhaps to get a real sense of their scale, it would probably be better to describe the Great Lakes as inland seas.).
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the word "lake", really does throw a lot of people off because to 95% of the world's people, lakes are smallish bodies of freshwater that you can always see the other side of. "freshwater sea" would really be a more accurate, if verbally cumbersome, term for the great lakes.
this reminds me of a conversation i had years ago with my british friend's father who was visiting chicago for the first time. i took the family up to milwaukee for a little day-trip. upon arriving at the milwaukee art museum, my friend's dad looked out across the vast blue expanse of lake michigan and remarked:
friend's dad: "my god, another great lake just like the one down in chicago. these lakes truly are remarkable, we've nothing like them back in blighty."
me: "oh no, this is still the same lake as the one down in chicago, it's all lake michigan."
friend's dad: "you mean we've just been traveling for a couple of hours on the motorway and we're still along the shore of the same lake?! unbelievable. exactly how large is this lake?"
me: "about 300 miles long in the north-south direction."
friend's dad: "
bloody hell! 300 miles long! that's almost the length of england itself! and you yanks call this vast sea a mere lake?"
me: "
well, it is all freshwater....... and there are 4 more of them to boot."
friend's dad: "unbelievable." <shaking his head in disbelief>
he had some prior awareness that the great lakes were big, but in his mind, when we traveled up I-94 from chicago to milwaukee, he had assumed that we had traveled from one great lake to another great lake, his mind had come nowhere close to wrapping itself around the true size and scale of the great lakes, because back home in britain, what he knew as "lakes" are simply small puddles in comparison to a body of water like lake michigan.