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Too many people conflate speech and behaviour with intelligence. One reason why Brits are (IMO wrongly) believed to be more cultured, educated and sophisticated as a whole than Americans is because of the way they speak and their manners. Just because Americans tend to be more casual and informal in their speech and behaviour than the British (leaving aside the 'Frasier Crane' types, who are surely outliers) doesn't make them more stupid and lacking in knowledge.
As a matter of fact, nowadays I meet many more Americans than Brits who can speak foreign languages (principally but by no means exclusively Spanish) to at least an intermediate level. (The notion that the US is such an exceptionally assimiliationist and monolingual nation is really outdated, insofar as it was ever true at all).
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