Wednesday, June 21, 2006

NY Most Polite City?

Well, it was the only US city in the report.

New Yorkers are a polite bunch.

No, really, they are. So says Reader's Digest.

The magazine sent reporters "undercover" to 36 cities, in 35 countries, to measure courtesy. New York was the only American city on the list.

In a city with a reputation for being in-your-face, New Yorkers seem to be expressing themselves with a new one-finger salute: a raised pinkie. In fact, they seem to have even better manners than people in London, Toronto and Moscow.

In its admittedly unscientific survey, the magazine's politeness-police gave three types of tests to more than 2,000 unwitting participants.

No surprise that it was an unscientific survey. Why have a scientific one?
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he's not surprised.

He told reporters Tuesday that whenever he travels abroad, he hears nothing but praise for the Big Apple's good manners.

"We are so jaded," he said. "We want to think the worst of ourselves, and people from around this country and around the world think exactly the reverse."

NY City manners should be ranked up there with their gun control laws. And I'm not saying that they are good. One wonders where exactly they performed their little test scenarios on people.

That's just too difficult to give any credence to.

1 comment:

Granted said...

It's been 12 years since I was there, but London was a wonderful city filled with very polite people, especially cabbies. When I think about NY cabbies... well, politeness doesn't really make the cut.