It always amazes me that we as a society insist on using ambiguous words ("crosswalks" or otherwise) when there is an option to use an unambiguous option.
It often happens with things designed and made in the USA. It is assumed that the terminology or customs of the USA apply to the rest of the world, when it's often not the case.
For example, their bizarre date system. Widespread use of state abbreviations and timezone abbreviations that are only known in the USA. "Zip code" on forms for customers in New Zealand or India or France.
Dates are the worst. 11/12/2020, is that November 12th or is that December 11th? I don't know and your shitty system makes no attempt to let me know whether they're using the regional format or the world-wide one.
Good point overall. I disagree with the abbreviations being exclusively a US thing. Two letter country abbreviations (UK, DE, IE, FR, DK, etc.) are popular in Europe, including on the back of food packaging which lists ingredients in multiple languages.
Yes, but, when taken out of context, you have no idea if you're looking at a state abbreviation or a country abbreviation.
AL can be Alabama or Albania, AZ can be Arizona or Azerbaijan, DE could be Germany or Delaware, etc. Just under half of US state abbreviations are "unique" (as in, not also used for some country in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard).
Personally I'm mostly annoyed by the concept of states when filling out delivery address. When I enter my country (that has no concept of states), I often find myself having to make something up because the state field is a required field.
Even worse: sometimes they do ask "state" and have a dropdown list of American states. If you live in another country that does have states, you're SOL.
Why would your dropdown still have those when I selected a different country?
Also why's the country picker at the bottom? I've learned to fill it out first and scroll back up the hard way. Otherwise you never know when fields will completely change when you select a country, or just discard everything you've entered previously.
NZ has postcodes, and they're 4 digits, which confuses some websites.
Yes, the dates are ridiculous. I've had to use an online assessment system with hard-coded backwards American due date formatting that I have to warn students about. The vendor just shrugged.
As another poster pointed out, elsewhere "postal code" is usually used. The format differs. In some places it might be 4121, somewhere else it might be SW1A 1AA. In the ROI, there are no post codes.
Driven primarily by frustration with foreign companies expecting post codes - the postal service was late to computerising which paid off in having better OCR/address lookup when they finally did so actually said they were pretty indifferent to the implementation of postcodes.
I have to say my experience with posties in Ireland has surpassed my experience with postcodes. I feel like the most valid "post code" would just be the name of the postman they should ask if they're not sure.
But I have to call out Ryanair in this context. For many years, before eircode, they demanded a postcode on their payment page. An Irish company, serving Irish customers, demanded postcodes when most the country didn't have them.
(And I paypal still believes my postcode is null. I don't recall ever entering that, so I wonder where/when it derived that.)
When I got a (remote) Irish jobs a few years ago I had to fill in a post code at my tax service and a few other things, and I also had to fill in an address in the format of "street number". This makes perfect sense in the Netherlands, and I can't really blame Dutch folk for not knowing that Ireland doesn't have postal codes and that not all houses have house numbers (but rather house names).
To be fair, I have seen non Americans making basically same assumptions.
I have even once seen a thread where Easter Europeans who never been in America argued with Americans about meaning of English word and about American culture. It was literally "are you sure you know better then American how Americans would interpret that word/situation in their day to day life" situation.
Here is an interesting idea, they might know it from their English lessons in school. Which might have taught British English and not American English. But who knows.
What's the unambiguous alternative for crosswalk? The only alternative that I can think of is "pedestrian crossing" and I'm not sure if that would be clearer.
