Posts: 11052
-
Karma: 113
Neither can I, and that's cause I have never seen enough of, nor met any Aussie pro skiers long enough to judge such a thing. To do so would be to judge someone on insufficient facts, which leads me to my second point.
As someone who has lived in England for 7 years, and just recently moved back to Vancouver, and spent considerable time in places such as Hong Kong and Taiwan in the past, I can honestly tell you that I have encountered a wide spectrum of personalities. I believe that many things, and I think you can agree with me on this one, such as the way you speak, the way you structure your sentences, what you think of when, the face you pull, or the way you react when you experience something, is strongly related to the environment in which you have grown up. Now, this is where I might have confused some people in my previous post. These characteristics listed above are different for everybody. Let's imagine that I said one sentence in front of you, while pulling a certain facial expression. That set of words and the expression I had on might've led you to think that I'm an asshole. One guy might point out a weirdly dressed guy by saying "look at that wanker" with a straight face, while another would say "check him out" with a smile, and both people could have exactly the same funny intentions, but be misunderstood by one another. In the same way, while I was in the Far East, I noticed a lot of asians misinterpret Western people, and don't understand intentions/etc. It's just that the way of thought is different.
What I was trying to say in my post was that, especially when you only get to hear a few sentences, it is really easy to misinterpret people for what they are not. The first few sentences you hear from someone might lead you to believe that someone has a huge ego, depending on the words, because those words in that combination would usually be used by someone with a huge ego in one part of the world. But once you actually get to know the person, you realize that their personality is not what they came across as in your initial exchange of words.
I was not saying that being British/Aussie/Kiwi immediately defines them as being arrogant/egotistic/cocky, but rather the different in upbringing would lead you to use a different set of words/expressions/body language that may give people a different initial impression. And I am not saying this is always the case, or wrong. All I was saying is that in a small sample size, it is easy to misinterpret someone - and while this is true for ALL people regardless of nationality/locale, it is more noticeable given the difference in lingo/way of speech, etc. My post was a suggestion that the OP might have misinterpreted Byron (and I wasn't saying it was or wasn't the case, either) due to the different speech/way of being.
Judging by the posts above, I appear to have offended some people, which I did not mean to do, but there also appears to be an equal amount of misinterpretation due to my brief post. And to the guy calling me ignorant, I made easy for you. Re-read my original post and then the italic part. You're twisting my words. There is a difference between "coming across as" and actually "being".
