Comments by "GunFun ZS" (@GunFunZS) on "The Great Vowel Shift and the History of Britain." video.
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To be honest it's fairly rare for an American to have a reason to say Oxfordshire in either way. (edit, I accidentally posted at this point, which might come across as impolite.) The point I was going to make is that if you get to general American recognition of Oxford, the shire isn't part of it at all. In general, I think most of us would know there's an Oxford university somewhere or other, and that it is prestigious. We also probably know of Oxford as being a basic type of shirt for office workers at the bottom of the professional queue. If you asked the man on the street what "shire" meant, he'd probably say, " I dunno, where hobbits are from?" A couple decades ago, it would have been "where Robin Hood is from, I guess?"
This is because most of us have no more reason to be aware of it than you would have the need to know the correct way to pronounce Willamette, or Oregon. In general, people from the UK put a lot more pride and emphasis on their regionalisms, than is done here. Americans do have pride of place, but not to the degree that is generally caricatured in EU media. Alaskans and Hawiians are a lot more likely to make it part of their identity. Texans to a lesser extent, though they talk of it more. For them, it is more of a shared running joke with an element of truth. We alaskans love to make fun of the people from little texas...
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