How the Scots invented the modern world
There’s a whole book about it. 
Just remember: states aren’t geography, they’re (ultimately) politics.
By any chance, have you married a girl from Minnesota recently?
ETA: 
Aren’t we done with this subject?
I never got this vibe from anyone, as a male, but as always YMMV.
IIRC the majority of Canadians do live within a relatively short distance of the U.S. border. which might be one reason for that.
I’m only 110 miles north of you, but we see “I heart (Mexican state name)” on people’s trucks and cars all the time. Do they not do that in San Diego, or does the loyalty to and/or identification with the state in question usually not go any farther than having a sticker? It’s been my experience too that I’ve never heard anyone say they were from Jalisco or Oaxaca.
This I pretty much agree with
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Yeah, around here Canadians are just assumed to be from Ontario. They usually identify their city, whilst outsiders would say their province.
Funny, I was wondering the same thing.
Not that I can ever recall seeing. I couldn’t tell you about loyalty or identification, but I’m also not positive that I’ve ever met anyone from a Mexican state other than BC.
By the way, have you noticed that you’re ending all your posts with
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lately?
I noticed a reaction to the whole Daniel Radcliffe/Equus thing that seemed very culture. Equus ran for a while and we all knew Dan Radcliffe was naked and fully exposed on stage. Yet, we never saw pictures and, if there was discussion on his genitals, it was whispered among friends.
On the other hand, Daniel has only been in the states for a bit but there are now a million articles about his penis and pictures of it all over the internet. Are Americans more curious about other people’s genitals? More open in their discussions of it?
Absolutely not.
Er, not at all. Different parts of Canada have wildly different histories, there have been and still are strong rivalries between different groups in the country (though we didn’t fight a civil war like yours) and today the culture varies a lot from place to place in Canada. Not homogeneous at all.
Criminal law in Canada is a federal responsibility for historical reasons. (And actually crimes are tried before the provincial courts even though the law is federal. Most provinces have their own police force to investigate crimes, as do most large enough municipalities.) Civil law is a provincial responsibility, and varies from province to province. This doesn’t mean our culture is more “centralized” than the US’s, and in fact, it isn’t.
If you ask me where I’m from, what I answer would probably depend on where you’re asking. I’ll probably say “Canada” somewhere in there because that’s what people abroad know about. But I still consider myself a Quebecer before I consider myself a Canadian.
The one time I was overseas I tended to answer where are you from with “Georgia, United States” or just “Georgia” if I wasn’t thinking. The reasons are two fold.
First, I’m used to Georgia being a sufficient answer because for most of my life the people asking me that have been Americans and know where that is.
Second, as others have said, my state is actually a very important part of my identity.
A good illustration of the second fact occurred just tonight. A guy I was talking to said I was a transplant who wasn’t really Georgian because though I was born and raised there my parents weren’t. I had to end the conversation because I about hit him. It felt to me like it was a direct attack on my personal identity. Honestly I was shocked about how angry I got and it made me realize how much my state, and by extension Southern culture, is an vital part of how I think of myself.
If I have offended or angered you, I apologize. I would like to note that all I said was that I would expect it from Canadians, and I would. You offered another explanation, which Canadian Hypnagogic Jerk disagrees with.
I see it on the internet all the time. On this board, posters assume you’re American to the point that they’ll base their arguments on it. Fine, maybe they consider this an “American” board. I had a website in the .nu top domain, my name (which does not sound American in the least) was on the website, and there was no indication anywhere that I was American. I had a long email conversation with an American who eventually asked “Just one thing… you’re not American, are you?”. This on a literally world wide network.
It’s not just an internet thing. Things like tone are difficult to convey in writing, but when Americans do have to identify themselves as American it’s with an “Oh, you see, I’m normal, I thought you realized that” tone. Americans also tend to expect foreigners to be knowledgeable about the US - geography, political system, cultural differences and so forth. I remember having a long email conversation with an American tech support customer which degenerated into a discussion of the histories of Puerto Rico and Massachusetts, where my earnest attempts to be courteous and helpful were construed as sarcasm because I didn’t know Massachusetts was a commonwealth (whatever that is) and when she said it was I thought, from the context of the conversation, that it wasn’t a state.
OK, you lost me here. Weren’t you the one bitching about straw men? Unless I missed something fairly significant here, I’m not sure how you got from “You can’t say ‘I’m Irish’ because I’m Jewish and queer” to … this accusation of someone hurling racial epithets. :dubious:
Anyhow.
Ask me where I’m from, I’ll say Chicago. Ask me what nationality I am, I’ll say American if I’m abroad, but if I’m here in the US, I will reply that I am Sicilian. As no one who wasn’t IN my family has any idea how much of the “Sicilian experience” I have experienced, it’s not up to any of them to argue how much right I have to that claim.
My very first night in Spain, I met some nice kids my age who offered to show me around town. One of the Spanish girls said, “Oh, you’re from California! Do you know Maria?”
You should have said, “Oh, of course. Wait, which Maria? Do you mean the shorter dark-haired one with the tattoo, or the taller blonde one with the mole on the side of her nose.”
Things can be weird. I met an American couple in Laos who had been living in Saudi Arabia for 20+ years. They were the next-door neighbors of the only guy I knew in Saudi Arabia.
I think that happens to a lot of Canadians, too. We have met two other bunches of Canadians in our travels down south - the ones we met in Salt Lake City were from a town five minutes north of Calgary, and the other ones we met in Montana were from Calgary itself. I think if we’d talked for any length of time, we would have found relatives/acquaintances in common. It’s almost embarrassing, because we are trying to quash that stereotype, but it might be kinda true. 
A friend visiting me from Texas was once astonished in the metro: “Those Asian women are speaking French!” I was moderately amused.
If someone asks me where I’m from, I say Montreal; if they ask me what my nationality is, I say I’m Canadian, but it’s not a question I’d expect. I would only recite my ethnic background if someone asked for that, just as I’d only start going into the places I’ve lived if they asked that, too.
Likewise – when speaking to a person from Scotland, I wouldn’t say, “I’m Scottish,” but rather, “My father’s family was originally from Scotland, though we’ve been in Canada for a few generations” or the like, if it came up (e.g. because of my last name).
I might say “I’m Scottish” in a throwaway fashion in other contexts when clearly referring to my ethnic background, but not when speaking to an actual Scot, since it would be misleading.
Apropos of nothing, I find myself asking new people, “So, what do you do? Interpret in whatever way you find most interesting.”
Well, you live in Michigan. If I were in Vermont, I’d say I was from Montreal. If I were in, say, Oklahoma, I’d probably say I was from Canada.
A small precision – the only provinces that have their own provincial police force are Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador; the other provinces employ the Mounties for provincial-level policing.
As described, the provinces and territories are responsible for applying criminal law in most cases, but the Criminal Code itself is federal.
Oh, Matt, thanks for quoting this, I wanted to address this the other day and forgot.
Is there any chance this could be a language issue? I don’t speak Italian, but in Bulgarian, anyway, if you ask someone “what do you do?” they will answer in the same way as Italians. To find out what someone does for a living, you have to ask “what do you work?”. It’s POSSIBLE that this example says more about the difference between English and Italian than the differences between Americans and Italians.
Sorry, I missed this. In my experience the Quebecois DO seem kind of loud - certainlt louder than other Canadians anyways. I think you’re on to something with the different-accents-seem-louder theory.