There's a big LLBean call center, I believe.

The latter will often find the idea that the former is also "Italian" ludicrous.

Maybe so, but Italian-Americans do have a lot of things culturally in common with each other, if not their land of origin. So it's still a useful designation.

German-American less so, since we're the default demo. We're even more generic than WASPs.

But Americans (especially?) seem to cling to their "genetic" heritage even after they lost most of the cultural trappings, including language

The reason I wonder about Canada is because of the often fierce lines drawn between the two categories in Quebec. Can you be such a "traitor" to your lineage to lose right to the name?

German-American less so, since we're the default demo.

Huh? I thought it was Anglo-Americans that were default. Did you gain default through numbers, or sheer force of cultural influence?

Did you gain default through numbers, or sheer force of cultural influence?

Numbers - not cultural influence.

German-American Irish American women are now "average". I am average. Well, aside from the Indians, the brain damage, and newbies thinking I'm black and/or from Baltimore... apart from all that, I'm average. I do not think it means what I think it means.

Numbers - not cultural influence.

There's a plurality of German Americans and their descendants among white Americans? With or without removing Hispanics?

I am surprised to learn that.

Isn't Lewiston where Bates College is? I think it was a papermill town (I decided I couldn't go to Bates, because of the smell). Is the mill closed?

I think it used to be used relatively openly to mark social class and exclusion, and vestiges of that remained into my childhood, where I told and heard French jokes of the sort that are called Polack jokes elsewhere in New England.

I never heard Polish jokes, growing up. They were always Italian jokes. Where, in New England, did you hear "Polack" jokes, Nutty?

Numbers - not cultural influence

Fear the power of the mighty Scots-German hybrid that came out of the forests of the Northeast, united by their dislike of the English colonists.

What's amusing is how some of my older relatives were adamant that they were in no way descended from Scots or Irish and accused me of faking the genealogical records I found.

Not in Lewiston. It's not pretty.

Good college there (Bates), but that's about it, especially once the mills went belly up.

I was amused by how wrong like a wrong thing that is wrong all the stuff in Maine looked in The Sopranos episode where Tony brought Meadow up to visit the big three colleges in Maine (Bates, Colby and Bowdoin, which is in my home town), esepcially since they film in Jersey and not out in California like most shows/movies that get Maine wrong.

There's a plurality of German Americans and their descendants among white Americans?

Most of those boats coming over in the big immigration waves of the early 20th century were full of Germans. The Irish just made more of a splash.