INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE: Setting a Story in Europe

by Leigh Lundin

I recently finished an international thriller that reminded me of a novella I’d read. Both were set in Europe, but I came away with the feeling grand European cities were all patterned on Dayton, Ohio.

The novella was set near Lake Como in Italy, but it may as well have been Lake Michigan. Everyone spoke with American idiom, listened to American music, and used American nomenclature. What’s the point of a foreign setting if it’s not foreign?

Being jerked out of a novel is bad for the reader, bad for the writer. Sharon’s reading Nora Robert’s Tribute. Page 30 brought her up short. A central character was named Ford, because he was conceived in the back seat of a Ford Cutlass. Er, Cutlass? Where was her editor?

Sharon once pointed me to a reader’s commentary upon a historical novel set in Scotland. A gentle reader reminded the author that (a) Scotch is a drink, not an adjective, and (b) as most of us already know, mesquite doesn’t grow in Scotland.

These weren’t insurmountable problems, but these authors and editors didn’t make the effort to get their setting right. It takes the reader out of the story.

I’m not an expert. I lived and worked in Europe, so herein are observations as an American. What I present here isn’t a comprehensive guide to European differences, but a desire to make the writer aware of some of the challenges in creating international settings.

5 Foot 2, Eyes of Blue

Outside of North America , no woman is 5’2 and 36-24-36, and no guy is a 96 pound weakling. Instead, he weighs 43.5 kilos while she’s 157 cm tall and 90-60-90.

(Wow! 90! Steve’s eyes just bulged. It’s actually 91-61-91, but rounded off.)

This evening, I helped Steve and Sharon with minor electrical and plumbing repairs. I found myself stymied because the faucet’s set screw required a metric allen wrench (or vice versa). Grrr. Isn’t it about time to standardize?

Griping aside, foreign characters aren’t going to give your spy directions by saying, "Drive two miles, turn right and drive 50 feet." It’s not going to happen, not in real life. Your character will be told something like, "Drive three kilometers, turn right, and drive 15 meters."

How to Do Metric

While we were sleeping, the rest of the world changed. Only three nations on the planet haven’t adopted the metric system (officially called SI): Burma, Liberia, and the USA, and the other two don’t even use our system. We’re entirely isolated.

Why is it drug dealers and drunks understand the metric system and the rest of us don’t? Street dealers don’t purchase 11 pounds of cocaine, they buy 5 kilos. Inebriated sots don’t ask for fifths or half pints, they order 250s (a quarter liter). Wine bottles are 750s (seven fifties) for the table or the larger 1.5s (one point fives) for parties.

Athletes get it: They don’t run the 440 (yards), they run the 400 (meters). They run, swim, and javelin toss in meters and lift in kilograms.

In a debate with a friend a few months ago, I contended that our insistence on the old Imperial system makes it difficult and expensive for us to compete in a world market. Even we get confused: Ounces has three different meanings in the US alone: dry, liquid, and troy. Miles have different meanings on land and sea.

My friend argued that the metric system was un-American. We’re spoiled, we’re rich, we don’t have to convert. I pointed out that we lost one of our Martian probes– missing the planet Mars entirely– because a national laboratory hadn’t converted to metric. One lab used metric and the other didn’t, which cost American taxpayers millions upon millions and international embarrassment.

Addressing the question of un-American measurement, the Imperial (royal) system of measurement came from our former adversary, England, which gave up the Imperial system long ago. Colonists, however, chose to use the units of their mother country and it stuck. Even Benjamin Franklin argued for adopting something other than the Imperial, presumably the French system of metric units.

This creates resource material not just for mysteries, but science fiction, intrigue, and non-fiction. Lobbyists and industrialists make terrific bad guys.

How to Measure Up

When the federal government passed TSA regulations requiring liquid containers no larger than 3.5 ounces be placed in 1 quart zip-lock bags, international hotels handed out 1 liter bags, only to have TSA refuse them. Why? One liter is 1.0566881 quart, just over 33 ounces instead of 32. Couldn’t the TSA have had enough foresight to anticipate this? Apparently not.

So, in writing (or traveling), here are rules of thumb:

• A liter is slightly more than a quart.
• A meter is about 10% more than a yard.
• An inch is 2.5 centimeters.
• A mile is 1.6 kilometers (klicks).
• A kilogram is 2.2 pounds.

Wow, I weigh 100 kg. (Well, I used to!)

Here’s an oddity: Internationally, mileage (or equivalent) isn’t measured in MPG, but in liters per 100 kilometers.

How to Count: Billion, Trillion, and Full Stops

Don’t be surprised to see numbers rendered differently.$98,765,432.10 in Europe will probably be shown as $98.765.432,10 USD. That’s right, the decimal point is a comma and the separators are dots.

Don’t ask me how this came about, but billion and trillion have very different meanings in different countries, called short scale and long scale.

• billion
  
  • 1,000,000,000 or 10^9 (short scale)
  • 1.000.000.000.000 or 10^12 (long scale)
• trillion
  
  • 1,000,000,000,000 or 10^12 (short scale)
  • 1.000.000.000.000.000.000 or 10^18 (long scale)

Most English-speaking nations (plus Brasil) have come around to the US-convention of using short scale, but a majority of countries use long scale. Some use neither and Puerto Rico uses both! There is a way to specify our concept of "billion" even in long scale countries, and this is to use the term "milliard".

Note that in the UK, the dot at the end of a sentence is not a period, but a full stop, and the letter at the end of the alphabet is not "zee", but "zed".

How to Set the Thermostat

Canadians occasionally use degrees Fahrenheit when they want to feel warmer, but the rest of the world would be mystified by our temperature scale. As you know, they use centigrade or Celsius. Rather than give you a conversion formula, I’ll mention a few set points you might use in a story.

How to Date

The thriller mentioned a date of 10/15/05, which instantly suggested the setting was more like Paris, Indiana than Paris, France. The vast majority of the world’s population use a date format of day-month-year, which would have made the date 15-10-2005.

Small banks have been known to refuse checks, thinking the date was wrong.

This is informal usage. Many professionals such as Rob, our librarian, are familiar with the ISO standard which uses a date format of year-month-day. It’s not common in casual use, but self-evident and often found in technical use.

When designing for an international market, I had to take these issues into account. I used a technique of writing dates as 15 Sep 2005, which is understood by most people regardless of national origin. I’m so used to writing dates this way, I tend to mess up forms that use the old standard.

How to Make Time

Those in the military, police, hospitals, computer people, and some other professionals already use 24 hour time, but it’s not commonly seen in civilian life in the US. If your character asks the time, he won’t be told it’s 1:30PM on the Continent, but 13:30 in Genève, Suisse (Geneva, Switzerland) or 13h30 in French speaking Bruxelles, Belge (Brussels, Belgium). In the UK, he could be told, "It’s half one."

How to Spell

English speakers often change spellings by a single letter, Denmark instead of Danmark, Brazil instead of Brasil, Italy instead of Italia, and Netherlands instead of Nederlands. An European spy will purchase a ticket from Milano to Roma, whereas a North American will enquire about Milan to Rome. Many years ago, we used to call the capital of China Peking, but after the Nixon visits, China suggested we spell and pronounce the capital Beijing. We should be at least aware of how Europeans spell their nations and cities.

For some reason, nobody outside of Deutschland calls Germany Deutschland. Examples are: Germany (English), Alemania (Spanish), Allemagne (French), Germania (Italian), Alemanha (Portuguese), and Tyskland (Norwegian).

How to Communicate

Moderately. Respectfully. Patiently. Humorously.

There’s an international joke:

• What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages?
  • Bilingual
• What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages?
  • Trilingual
• What do you call a person who speaks 1 language?
  • American

I saw a bumper sticker a few days ago: No Habla Jibber-Jabber. If another person doesn’t speak our language, there’s a tendency to think they’re dense. If the other person thinks the same way, conversations fall apart.

As a tourist, you may feel at a disadvantage, but as a writer, you can exploit this in different ways. Your hero can be dashing, trained in martial arts, and multilingual, which is a typical Hollywood rôle. Sprinkle in a few, obvious-sounding foreign words, similar to an Hercule Poirot novel to add authenticity, and your novel is on its way.

Alternatively, your protagonist can be a naïf, a stranger in a strange land, forced to deal with a language barrier as part of his ordeal. Personally, I think this latter situation presents more interesting opportunities: tension, romance, humor from miscommunications, and assistance from unexpected sources.

How to Be Rude

A half century ago, Lederer and Burdick wrote The Ugly American, ‘fictionalized’ to protect the guilty, republished a few years ago. Although it was about ineptitude of the diplomatic corps who should know better, it contains lessons for all of us.

Despite assertions by Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw, Americans aren’t deliberately rude, but come off that way from cultural isolation. Patience, reticence, and humor go a long way toward bridging the gap. Sometimes errors in understanding and judgment contribute to perceptions of rudeness. Unless your novel is set before World War II, don’t have your protagonist signal a French waiter by calling out, "Hey, garçon," the equivalent of saying, "Hey, boy!"

And, whatever you do, don’t have your protagonist pat an Englishwoman on her fanny.