I have wondered the same...and i think the same... that the kind of people who emigrate to Canada are generally not the same kind of people that go to Australia. I find that i probably fall into the Australia category of person (that doesnt mean i ever wanted to live there) just the type of person i am.

Personally also i dont hold with people who seem to live their lives through their children and judge their own quality of life on those of the kids. To say we would stay even if we were unhappy because our children are happy is madness!!!

Agree.

And yet anyone who honestly expresses their true feelings, but happens to disagree with you, is a member of a clique who is towing the party line.

+1 for spelling "clique" correctly. If you can't spell it, you can't join it.

- 1000 for "towing the party line".

Guilty.

ah, but the party line is very heavy. That's how people justify buying the big 4x4 truck, so they have enough towing capacity.

As for me, I shall henceforth fly in the face of convention and heel the party line instead.

I suspect I may not have been invited either, especially if spelling is involved. If this alleged clique is so pro canada I cant understand why one alleged member posts a lot of anti canada polemic and another is off to France once work is no longer a bother. Then again, maybe I have my cliques confused... too many to keep track of.

I stand by my initial advice that people should wait more than 6 months, preferably at least a year before jumping ship.

That's dangerously close to line-dancing. And to bastardise a famous quote for life in North America...'one should try anything in life, except incest and line dancing"

http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/de...ne*19+0&dict=I

J

Well I never. You learn something new everyday.

as you'll no doubt know, the job of a dictionary is to reflect the current usage of idiom, without necessarily commenting on its etymology or "correctness" (I use the term loosely). The original expression was undoubtedly "toe the line." Precise etymology - probably from boxing - is unclear, but it appears to have been widely used in various forms from the second quarter of the 19th century (OED, Webster, Chambers all have citations from the 1820s and 1830s).

"Tow the line" is a recent bastardization popularized by lazy journalists. I can't find a reference older than the mid-1980s. It appears in august publications such as the Cambridge dictionary because it is in regular common usage. That doesn't make it any more excusable for those of JonboyE's or AX's standing.

I've always suspected that the modern usage results from an unconscious conflation of "toe the line" and "kowtow".

Do I get my 1000 points back now please?.
J

I assumed that the derivation was something like a boat being towed. That is, it has no freedom to chose its own direction and had to follow the boat that was towing it.

As observed, one learns.

However, I still prefer my derivation to the real one.

am now very curious as to the differences between canadian BEs and Australian BEs. Would someone mind explaining what they are?