As a person who is keenly interested in globalization, I’m always quite struck by the perseverance of various product pockets. By a product pocket, I mean anything that is a huge phenomenon in one culture but simply does not have the same impact in other cultures.
Now, it’s one thing when these product-pockets exist in wildly disparate cultures which speak different languages. But with globalization, you’d expect that English speaking cultures might quickly merge sensibilities and lose almost all major differences.
But such is not the case. To the point: I recently encountered the tartan product that is wildly famous in the British Isles (Scotland and Ireland in particular). I had never even heard of tartan before.
So, if you are American, you might be wondering what tartan is. That’s evidence of cross-cultural deviation within English speaking nations. There are numerous other examples, but this one struck me as I had never heard of tartan before.
