I've visited that part of the country before. I tell people I visited SF. I have no clue if I was actually inside the city proper. The problem with the "these people are prickly" notion is that THEY'RE NOT WITH ME BACK HOME TO CORRECT ME and thus I don't really have to give a shit if I stepped inside the city boundaries or not.

[nothing personal] by that logic (no one is around to correct you and also you don't give a shit) you can start making plenty of things up. Oh what a stories you should have about your travels and adventures!

Yes of course, I completely agree. You're 100% right that I can make up any lie I care to and it's even easier if there's nobody to call me out on it. And I don't take it personally, it's not offensive.

My point, though, is that the notion that the residents of SF have any ability to sway the visitors to SF as to what they tell people back home is bogus.

>>I suspect SF is the same. People can visit anywhere in the Bay Area and go back home and credibly say "I visited San Francisco" even if they never actually stepped foot in the city proper.

>No, no they couldn't. Residents of SF are quite prickly about what is and isn't the city. You'd say you visited the bay area or possibly silicon valley not SF.

This second statement one I take issue with, made by coolsunglasses. What mechanism does coolsunglasses have to force me to know the difference between "bay area" and "san francisco" and "silicon valley"? How does he propose to regulate my speech such that I don't offend his (or others) sense of which areas are which?

I get that people who live in SF proper might get upset if someone said that. That is their right. But for the vast majority of the population (think "flyover states" and probably a good bit of the east coast) visiting anywhere in the bay area is just as good as the "real" san francisco. At least from a communicating-the-idea-of-what-happened perspective. And the folks in SF or the bay area not liking it doesn't do anything to make it impossible to say. Inaccurate? Perhaps. But uninformative? Not at all.

Actually I do recall meeting some people in one "tourist's destination" place who answered "we're from San Francisco" to "where are you guys from?" and then later specified they from bay area not far from SF (I myself live in SF). It's a matter of convenience I guess, when you are in the place with plenty of people from different regions it will quickly give an idea what part of US you're from without going into detailed explanations when not necessary.

When people ask me where I'm from I say "DC". I actually grew up in Alexandria, VA. But I'm not lying to those people[1], I'm trying to give them a general idea of where I'm from that they are most likely to know. If they follow up with "what part of DC" then I know they are more familiar with the area and I say something like "well actually, i grew up outside DC in northern virginia".

Now that I live in Oakland I say I live in Oakland, but if I lived in, say, fremont, I'd probably just say the SF Bay Area. People probably know Berkeley, Oakland, SF, Palo Alto, and San Jose as specific places around the bay, so you can safely say those, but if you are from Walnut Creek...no one (generally) outside of the area can actually place that, so defaulting to "SF Bay Area" or even "SF" is simpler and puts the person you are talking to in the right geographical area.

[1] - well, technically I am.

>But for the vast majority of the population (think "flyover states" and probably a good bit of the east coast) visiting anywhere in the bay area is just as good as the "real" san francisco.

Not really, no. If I said I visited SF, my grandfather from Florida would ask me what neighborhoods I visited and restaurants in SF I went to.

Backing up your point, the following appeared in SF Weekly (one of the alt-weekly newspapers):

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/03/how_san_francisc...