DrQuickbeam

I’m an American that lives in Italy about half of the time. I was being facetious a bit, but it is true that there is a cultural differences in how people think about this, it’s not just words. Someone else commented on the German words for it, which (as is typical with German over Romantic languages) is more appropriately descriptive.

“Go up 3 floors and turn left.” in the US would put you on the fourth floor, but in Europe each floor you go up is the number of the floor you are on. It’s more common in the US to say “Go up to the 2nd floor.” unless you’re not starting on the 1st floor.

In Europe if you say “I want a building with 7 floors.” no one will be confused, they will know that you want a ground floor and 7 above ground floors. They would probably also know what an American means when they say it. Only the Americans would be confused and they hilariously are as they look for their AirBnB’s here on vacation!

Americans always focus on facades, and think about buildings as commodities. The logic is that in the American conception, each floor is a floor-to-ceiling architectural layer, as viewed from the front of a building. So you think:

B2 - Second layer below visibility B1 - First layer below visibility 1 - First visible layer 2 - Second visible layer 3 - Third visible layer

“How many layers am I paying for, when I buy this building? Sir, If you buy 7 layers at this low, low price. I will throw in an 8th layer for free!” “OMG did you hear Frank’s new house has 4 layers! Frank has way more status than Bob and his paltry two layer building.”

Whereas in most countries, the conception is that a floor is each literal floor you pass as you go up or down while traveling inside a building.

-2 - I’ve descended two floors -1 - I’ve descended one floor 0 - I haven’t gone up or down since I entered this building 1 - I’ve ascended one floor 2 - I’ve ascended two floors

Exactly. In most countries, you reason that you never need to count floors unless you are going up or down. If you are walking up stairs, each floor you go past, you count it: F1, F2, F3, etc. If you are walking down stairs, you count each floor you go past: B1, B2, B3, etc.

Americans think about it more like a cake. Each “story” or “floor” is a ~3m or 4m, floor-to-ceiling, architectural layer. You don’t look at a 3-layer cake and say “that cake has a ground layer, then a first layer and a second layer” you say “that cake has three layers”.

This was my first thought. VC’s always expect 4 out of 5 projects they invest in to fail and always have. But it still makes them money because the successes pay off big. Is the money and resources wasted? Welcome to modern capitalism.

Praise the sun!

Lebanon is a beautiful country and Beirut is a fun city, but man their government bungled things for so long that everything is falling apart and all the money is leaving the country.