A question about closed (but not necessarily compact) connected subsets of Euclidean spaces.

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Is the following statement true?......

If $C$ is a non-degenerate closed and connected subset of the Euclidean plane $\mathbb R ^2$ and $p$ is any point of $C$, then there exists a connected subset of $C$ which contains p and has an arbitrarily small positive diameter.

If the answer is "yes", is this statement still true for any finite dimensional Euclidean space?

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Yes, and yes it also holds in any finite dimensional Euclidean space.

Let $C$ be a closed connected subset of $\mathbb R ^n$.

Then $C$ has a compactification $\gamma C$ (such as $\text{cl}_{[-\infty,\infty]^n} C$), and will be open in $\gamma C$ because it is locally compact.

Let $c\in C$ and let $U=B(c,\epsilon)$ be an $\epsilon$-neighborhood of $c$. Note that $U$ is also open in $\gamma C$. By the boundary bumping theorem for connected compact Hausdorff spaces, the component $K$ of $c$ in $U$ meets the boundary (in $\gamma X$) of $U$. Then $K$ is nontrivial, $c\in K\subseteq C$ and $K$ diameter less than $2\epsilon$.

Note: You do not really need $C$ to be closed; it could be open also. The important thing is that it is locally compact. You could have a big problem if $C$ is not locally compact. Consider the Knaster-Kuratowski fan in $\mathbb R ^2$. No point other than the dispersion point has connected sets around it of small diameter.