I always find this kind of discussion amusing because my perspective is that of a
real Southerner,
i.e., someone (originally) from the Southern Hemisphere, even if I live in the other half of the world (you know, where they have the seasons backwards) these days.
When I was a kid, I used to find things like the anthropomorphic drawings of the winds that were found in comics to be very weird: the South wind was usually a "Southern" belle, drawl and fake dialect and all, which was just plain odd to someone who's felt the winter wind "straight off the Antarctic"; and the North wind was worse, all ice and snow gear, when I was used to "hot Northerlys" that could make summer days almost unbearable (not to mention the occasional dust storms they brought -- ever seen a dark red cloud blot out huge swathes of the sky over a city?).
Mind you, the Poms are worse, what with their obsession with naming parts of England -- they even put it on road signs: "The North", "The South", "The South-West" and so on (we shall pass over the Scots who, of course, are further north than all the English
). And they use it as a reason to squabble; I've squelched more than one pointless argument by interjecting (after thickening my natural accent), "Well, from where I sit, you're all bloody Northeners anyway!" By the time they recover from the blasphemy, they've generally forgotten what they were arguing about in the first place. :rolleyes:
Oh, and "opossums" are so named to distinguish them from Australasian possums. It may also be a sign of the (in-?)famous courtly "Southern" manners that they are
Opossums rather than what their southern cousins are generally referred to as, namely "Bloodypossums!"
Phil
