On The Politeness Of Countries

Jim McElroy had a few thoughts regarding politeness....

Marc,

Your recent post regarding the politeness of New Zealanders pinged a memory cell. Recently, I ran across a post by some blogger that was directly pertinent to that subject, but I have lost the link and a serious google search was unable to locate it. The gist of the post was the definition of a function "canada" to describe the transformation between the population characteristics of countries or other large groups.

The function was defined by canada(X) = Y where X is the set of any large, loud and obnoxious country or group, and Y an example of a smaller, nearby but tightly linked neighbor. The defining relationship was given as:

canada(United_States) = Canada

Because of the strong overwhelming if not overbearing relationship of X to Y, the characteristics of Y were a bit of inferiority complex combined with a strong desire to differentiate themselves from the characteristics of X. To a large extent the citizens of Y define themselves as ~X (not X) and as a result take great pride in the equation Y = ~X. Several other examples of the canada function were given, but I cannot recall them all. Some memorable ones however were:

canada(England) = Scotland
canada(Australia) = New_Zealand
canada(Canada) = Quebec

Because of the Y = ~X factor it is not surprising that one of the most quoted characteristics of Canadians is, "Canadians are so nice". Now your note about the politeness of New Zealanders is easily explainable by Y = ~X.

The post went on to describe the inverse function, which is a test to determine whether an individual belongs to set X or Y. It works everytime and is easily tested. To determine if an individual is a Canadian or US citizen simply make the offhand comment, "I find it really hard to tell the difference between Canadians and Americans". If the response is, "who cares?", the're US. If your ears burn for days afterward they are Canadian. The same would be true for other examples of the transform function.

It is amusing to compile lists of additional examples of the canada function, remembering that X and Y need not be actual countries but may be large definable groups. For example I offer the functions:

canada(Bay_Area) = Sacramento
canada(Sacramento) = Davis

and finally,

canada(China) = all other countries, severally or jointly

Have fun.

Jim McElroy