Now that's an interesting question

Saint Jack
- From what I could gather, Diego appears to come from Thiago. Thid means that San Diego would be Saint James.
  
  It's named after Saint Didacus, who went by Diego, I guess.

Oh heck yeah friggin racist le epic owned
- People clapped so hard their hands hurt.
- And then we all clapped

"A whale's vagina."
- Go fuck yourself, San Diego.
- "No, I don't think that's correct "

St Jacob

For reference, San Diego and Tijuana back right up to each other and have one of the busiest border crossings in the country.
You're going to hear Spanish there.
- Btw, San Diego would be Saint James.
  
  Best we can do is Saint America.
  
  It's wild that the name Diego becomes James in English!
  I would've thought of Daniel or something but no, JAMES
  
  That's interesting and all but many Spanish speaking people have had family on this side of the border since California was a Mexican territory.
- Well, California was a Spanish colony, sfter all.
  
  Not only, it used to be a Mexican State

- Especially ironic in San Diego, where literally anywhere in the city is a mere 15 minute drive to the Mexican border.
  San Diego is full of the wildly entitled and elderly though, so the self-selecting personalities can't be a surprise for anyone who has lived there.
  
  It'd be a really pleasant place to live if it weren't for the huge amount of selfish, entitled fucking pricks that do.

Lmao, if you live in San Diego and can't handle Spanish you're gonna have a bad time.
- All of Southern California really.
  My favorite is when dickhead white folks say they want "all the brown people to go back where they came from," without the slightest clue that they were here first, and then they get real pissy when you point that fact out.
  
  Yeah I point out that Texas used to actually be part of Mexico and the border moved, not the people.
  
  I live in a white flight town in the bay area. We're still 20% Hispanic. Maybe Shasta?

This stuff is embarassimg. I swear, next time i travel I'm gonna have to claim I am Canadian.
The stupid - it burns!
- Don't pedestalize Canadians. We're just as dumb and racist. Remember, ppl are unironically fighting for private health care.
  
  I didn't intend to do that. I realize you also have a growing right-wing that is on the same page as ours, and there are other excesses, along with insane housing issues.
  I also feel like the ire of the world is not as strongly directed at you. We have decadea of negative stereotypes. It comes from being "in your face" for so long and having such outsize influence in the world.
  I remember encountering several negative ideas during my term abroad in Europe during college and was very careful to avoid reinforcing any of them.
- I heard there's a tariff on those Canadian pins and badges.
  
  I'll pick them up in the tax-free section of the airport! :)
- Why? They can be just as stupidly racist.
  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/waterloo-video-racially-charged-comments-1.7354996
  
  It's an old tactic used by American travellers, put a Canadian flag cap or patch on the bag and present themselves as Canadian to avoid the negative stereotypes, I've personally talked to more than one American doing this in my life and read about it more often online too. I guess it's only gonna get more popular.
  
  Yeah, i know. See my other reply from moments ago. I've never heard the term "ugly Canadian" or railing against their imperialist culture abroad. I've seen some latent sense of superiority over them (especially wrt frankophones) but not outright hatred. They aren't treated like a threat, from my limited experience, and that was before our government went Fascist.
- The racism or the made up story?
  
  Both. Sure, the actual exchange might be made-up. The problem is that it's entirely plausible it is real. I've seen this kind of exchange happen on video (which of course could also be made up). It's common for television shows to do stories on what the "person on the street" knows about some topic. For local news stories, it's usually to showcase how poorly educated "the youths" are today.
  Periodically a reporter will go to a public place and showcase how people answer questions that arguably should be fairly easy to answer with an elementary school education or if they check in with some news source regularly and actually understand the topic. The worst ones are where they are "confidently incorrect".
  Jimmy Kimmel does this regularly for laughs. I've seen several examples going back decades from various local news programs. In all cases, I'm confident they are showing the 10% of interviewees that were the most clueless, and not showing the other 90%. Still, the level of cluelessness on the ones they do show is often truly frightening.
  
  Mi vida, llevo 30 años viviendo en esta frontera, 0% falsa la historia; pasa todo el día en todas partes.

The accurate response to this is “a whale’s vagina.” Idk how one can live there and not know this.
- Foreigner here, what's the joke there?
  
  It's from the movie Anchorman with Will Ferrell, it's his pickup line on a date.
  https://youtu.be/8AIwaSD9Sco
- Scholars maintain that the translation was lost long ago!
- Woof. I said something similar before seeing your comment.

Hey, what’s the English word for California??
- Technically, Caliphate. Calafia was the queen of the made up kingdom of California in a 16th century novel. The name comes from there.
  The name of Calafia was likely formed from the Arabic word khalifa (religious state leader) that is known as caliph in English and califa in Spanish.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calafia?wprov=sfti1
  
  That's the dumbest and most beautiful premise for naming a place that I've seen
  
  And Khalifa (خليفة) in the Arabic language literally means successor/inheritor (aside from the religious connotations), so there is some trivia for the day.

I have seen variations on this online for a long time, and this has always baffled me: do strangers in America really go up to random people who are speaking foreign languages and tell them "you are in X, speak Xese", a language they may or may not speak? Even among people who share their native language?
- You can get the same in Quebec for speaking English.
- Yeah there's a segment of arrogant racist halfwit conservatives that get a superiority kick out of demeaning people for stuff like that.
- When I was a kid my mother's boyfriend bragged of doing exactly this. He heard them having a conversation in another language at a gas station, approached them, and started speaking to them in German. When they were confused he allegedly said exactly the phrase. You are in America, speak English. He thought it was hysterical.
  He may have been full of shit, but the fact that he felt it worth bragging about said enough about him.
- I saw it twice that I can remember in person in my ~30 years growing up and living in the US. Can't speak for the last decade as I've only spent a couple weeks in the US in that time to see family.
- Sadly, but also a bit humorously, yes.

If she had responded with "A Whale's Vagina," I would have died.

Saint James…
- Fun fact, the name Santiago, is basically the same as San Diego. Originally, it comes from the hebrew Jacob (ya-akov), then Sant Iago (Iago sounds similar to ya-akob, it's the latinization of the name IIRC). I think Diego actually comes from shortening Santiago to Thiago, and then to Diego. Basically all comes from Jacob. In Spanish, the actual translation for James would be Jaime, not Diego. I don't know what happened there or if Jaime and Diego as somehow related etymologically.
- The point being she didn't even know.

Without Doug.

Is it an interesting question @ptz@dubvee.org