I’m currently partway through watching the new season 4 of Stranger Things on Netflix. And really enjoying it – a lot more than I liked the previous season. I think I need to go back to the start of season 1 and rewatch everything again, and maybe season 3 will feel better this time.
Besides watching the show on TV, today I also got out my Stranger Things Lego characters and photographed a batch of new comics. This is 4 weeks’ worth of new strips, to cover this week, the next two weeks when I’m overseas in Europe, and a week after getting back. Hopefully that will give me time to make a new batch to follow directly on.
So here’s a question I was wondering about today: Here in Australia we use the word “overseas” to refer to any international travel. Do people in countries with land borders use the word “overseas” the same way? Do Americans use “overseas” to describe travel to Canada? Or Brazil? Or only for travel to Europe/Asia/Africa/Australia?
New content today:
As an American, I’ve never heard anyone say it for Canada. Usually it means flying east to Europe, or west to Asia. But the entire northern population of the US could drive to Canada in a few hours at most. However, Central and South America aren’t referred to as “overseas” either.
People in the USA do sometimes use “overseas” synonymously with “abroad”. I think it’s culturally inherited from our joint colonial power, England.
German who lived in the US for 10 years now, here. Haven’t heard it that way in the US (though doesn’t mean it’s not used that way), but can definitely tell that in Germany you don’t use it for any international travel. The literal translation exists (Übersee), but it really means “across the ocean” and has a very strong connotation of “far away”. Like, I don’t think I’d personally use it for Corsica or Sardinia, even though there’s technically an ocean in between.
Then again, for a lot of Europeans other countries with completely different cultures and languages can just be a short train ride away, so “international travel” isn’t that special either… we tend to emphasize if we change continents. Never thought about how what’s almost all of Australia’s international travel, except maybe New Zealand?
I find @Julien’s comment interesting, because there are countries much closer to Australia than New Zealand. Specifically, both New Guinea and East Timor.
Not from Sydney though. In fact the closest foreign country to Sydney is France! (Since New Caledonia is part of France.)
Israel uses the hebrew word “out of the country” – we are surounded by land countries, so there’s that. We do use “across the sea” when being flowery or writing poetry – which is weird because there is a land route from most of the places we came from to Israel. It’s possible to walk from europe and from the arabian countries to Israel, so why do a lot of old poems are written about missing “the land across the sea”? Weird…