And it’s not just the grizzlies. Visitors to this area often seem to think that moose are just big antlered horses and bison are just big passive cows. wrong
People get killed by moose and bison. In fact, significantly more people are injured by bison every year than bears. A full-grown bull bison weighs over a ton, can jump a five-foot fence from a standing start, and can run over 40 miles per hour.
Do. Not. Approach.
Whew. I’m really glad my copious reading over the last ~40 years has kept me from forming most of these misconceptions.
Here’s a few more regional ones:
Floridians certainly do not all support Bush/Republican party
It’s not all beaches here
It does actually get cool for a few days in winter
We’re not all ignorant hicks with indecipherable accents down here in the south
There are some honest-to-God native Floridians (3rd generation on one side, 4th or more on the other)
Well, as Spoons points out, there are in fact a few francophones in the Prairies, but the thing is that Canada is large enough and has enough different cultures in it that there isn’t really a way that you can represent a “Canadian” in which a majority of Canadians would recognize themselves. Maybe they represent Canadians as speaking French*, but they might just as well give all “Canadians” a Newfoundland accent, or make them punctuate their sentences with "eh?"s. It would be just as accurate, maybe less. Would you dislike that as much? And what would you use if you wanted to represent a “Canadian”? Would you say it’s even possible?
*Do you have examples, by the way? (Maybe the South Park movie – I haven’t seen it, but it appears to be the case. Other than that, though, with the possible exception of people in France, and with apologies to Spoons, my experience is that when foreigners think about Canada, they think about English Canada, and if they are aware that some people in Canada speak French, and are even the majority in Quebec, that is what they have misconceptions about. Well, the French also have misconceptions about Canada, but they don’t necessarily think of Canada as an “English” country.)
No.
I do not wear grass skirts or live in a grass shack, although I have been to Kealakekua Bay. 
Sure it does, I’d do them maybe half the barbecues I put on.
Not a majority, sure, but “very few”? I’d say a large minority (of anglo-celt background, obviously) have some convict ancestry.
Yeah it is 
But it’s certainly not the capital.
Others:
Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world. The bush myth here is like the cowboy myth in the US; hardly anyone actually lives there. Most of the aborigines live in cities just like everyone else.
We’re not all fit tanned lifesavers or bronzed bushmen. We come second only to the US in the obesity stakes.
Australia is nearly as big as the continental US (but with 1/15 the population). Don’t expect to get around quickly.
We have coffee here of all sorts , at least in the major centres. You don’t need to bring your own (I’m looking at YOU, NBC). Similarly with pretty much all the other accoutrements of modern life.
About Canada:
That we are assigned doctors by the government. I don’t know where this one got started, but it’s complete nonsense. I can see whatever doctor I can get an appointment with, I can use any hospital emergency room or clinic I want, etc.
That French-Canadians are culturally identical to French people from France, complete with berets and hon-hon sank-eaven-for-leetle-girls stereotypes. That they speak French with a French-from-France accent.
That pot is legal. Not yet, unfortunately, though we were close for a while.
That we have major, ongoing political ties to Britain. Usually a misunderstanding over the role of the Queen, the nature of the Commonwealth, etc.
That we have no cities to speak of. This one amuses me greatly. No, we have cities, with millions of people, and highways and parking and subways and towers and big stadiums and pharmacies and running water and no moose and everything.
And, from experience last summer in and around Toronto, some big-ass traffic jams! 
:mad:
It really is a beautiful country, though – at least the little I saw of it (basically a bee’s-line along the St. Lawrence, from Niagara up to Tadoussac, including Toronto, 3 hours(:(!!) in Montreal, and Quebec.)
Askance writes:
> Not a majority, sure, but “very few”? I’d say a large minority (of anglo-celt
> background, obviously) have some convict ancestry.
I’ve heard it’s much less. I did some Google searches and found one reference that says that the percentage of Australians with convict ancestry is less than 3%. This was a blog though, so it’s not the best reference.
That was my understanding, too. I don’t know anyone personally who can trace their ancestry back to a Transportee- most people’s families appeared to have emigrated during the Gold Rush or at some point since then for much the same reasons that people in any given time emigrate from one place to another.
There weren’t actually that many European people in Australia prior to the Gold Rush… the country was basically a very long way from “Civilisation”, and it was a long trip to get to this part of the world… hence the decision to use New South Wales as a penal colony- people sent there would be well out of the way.
Of course, once they found Gold, all bets were off and Australia was suddenly a lot more desireable place to move to…
Same over here! 
What would happen?
Basil gets a bit tetchy?
No apologies necessary. I got to thinking about this one and maybe what’s happening, severus, is that we just notice it more when foreigners remark about Canada being French (in my case) or English (in your case). When I do think of it, I can remember many, many foreign business associates and other visitors who said nothing at all on the subject of Canada being French. Same with the ones who don’t remark with surprise upon the lack of ice and snow when they visit in July, the ones who don’t think grizzlies and moose are cute and cuddly furballs who like human contact, and the ones who don’t think the Queen plays a larger role in our affairs than she actually does.
Regardless of the misconception, the ones who do remark on it seem to stick out and become the ones we remember. The Boston woman sticks out in my memory because her remark just seemed so odd; she was a professional whom I’d expected to know more than her remark indicated. But in the time since (and now that I think of it), I’ve met a number of different people from Boston, from Massachusetts, and from New England, and she was the only one who remarked upon it. So, when this topic comes up, she becomes the one I remember.
Severus, do you think there’s any validity to this idea that it’s the minority who make the weirdest assumptions and hold such odd misconceptions who are the ones we remember most, while we forget the majority who say nothing at all?
Yes, you’re probably right about that.
From founding in 1788 up to when transportation into NSW ceased in 1840 (only 52 years) 150,000 convicts had been sent to Australia (more went to Perth from 1850 up to 1868). In 1850 the whole population of Australia was only 400,000, so convicts or their descendants were already more than a third. Assuming an annual growth rate of only 2% from, say, 100,000 (to allow for convict dying and having less opportunity for marriage) you get a population of 330,000 by 1900, or 10% of the population - and that’s ignoring that inter-marriage between convict descendants and others creates many more people of partially convict decent.
Askance writes:
> From founding in 1788 up to when transportation into NSW ceased in 1840
> (only 52 years) 150,000 convicts had been sent to Australia (more went to
> Perth from 1850 up to 1868). In 1850 the whole population of Australia was
> only 400,000, so convicts or their descendants were already more than a third.
> Assuming an annual growth rate of only 2% from, say, 100,000 (to allow for
> convict dying and having less opportunity for marriage) you get a population of
> 330,000 by 1900, or 10% of the population - and that’s ignoring that inter
> marriage between convict descendants and others creates many more people
> of partially convict decent.
And there has been a lot of immigration since 1900. This is O.K. for vague approximate calculations, but it’s not really answering the question. I’ve read two different figures. One said that the proportion of Australians with convict ancestry is well under 10%, while the other said that it’s less than 3%. Do you have any actual official figures on this, as opposed to just attempts to calculate the number using immigration figures and probable growth rates? Otherwise I think we’re stuck with saying that nobody really knows.
Spoons writes:
> A former business associate from Boston, who made her first visit to Canada for
> a series of meetings at our office, told me how relieved she was to find that
> everyone she met up here spoke English–she was worried that we’d all be
> speaking French, and she wouldn’t understand a word.
There are neighborhoods in large cities and entire towns in New England with large proportions of people of French Canadian descent. Two of my best friends, who grew up in Boston, think of themselves as being half-French-Canadian(although neither they nor their mother speaks any French, just as their father, of Hungarian descent, didn’t speak any Hungarian). So this woman might be thinking that most Canadians speak French, since the people of Canadian ancestry she knows are all descended from ones who spoke French.
No, I don’t, despite diligent searching, which is why I bothered to make the rough calculations at all. I realise the huge immigration waves in the 1850-60s and post WWII will have diluted convict heritage to a large extent, but on the other hand they were over 1/3 of the population 200 years ago so will have had a long opportunity to spread their genes widely (if thinly) through the population.
If “convict ancestry” means that any one of your direct ancestors was a convict, then each convict who bred at all is likely to have many ancestors now. Each of us has 64 ancestors of 6 generations ago (some of whom may be the same, it’s true) and only one of them has to be convict for you to count as having convict ancestry.
I’ve been in Turkey when theres been deep snowand the Gulf when its rained .
I once tagged along with fella bilong missus flodnak to a computer-geek conference in Tromsø, northern Norway. The attendees came from all over Europe and were all intelligent, educated people. But several couldn’t resist saying out loud that they didn’t realize there were electricity and running water north of the Arctic Circle :rolleyes:
Other misconceptions about my adoptive homeland:
What about the weird fish stuff, flodnak? Do they eat all kinds of weird fish? Or is that Iceland I’m thinking about? I’m extremely prairie in my fish tastes - if it tastes fishy, I’m not interested. I don’t want to go somewhere where everything tastes fishy.
Are Norwegians (can I call them Norskies too, or is that an internal thing?) as easygoing and liberal as they are reputed to be?