Editorial: What's French for tight-fisted?

Opinion

Call a generalisation a survey result and you can get away with murder.

The observation that Americans are loudmouths or the French are arrogant might, in some company, earn a reproof for having engaged in some untoward cultural stereotyping.

But the same observation made to a researcher just gets a tick in a box on a form and a place in the final results.

Thus the second annual global Best Tourist Survey by online travel company Expedia quizzed 4500 hoteliers about the characteristics of different tourist groups and came up with predictable findings: Americans are loudmouths and French are arrogant.

Well, to be precise about it, Americans were judged by survey participants to be the noisiest of the nationalities (the Australians - surprise, surprise - weren't far behind) and the French the most impolite.

By contrast, New Zealanders were more polite and uncomplaining than average.

We didn't score that well when it came to learning the local lingo, for which we can hardly be blamed since we're having enough trouble with the finer points of English, such as pronouncing "known" as one syllable and sounding the "s" at the beginning of "specifically". Give us a break here, will ya?

But as a nation we ended up at the exact median point overall, which is a very satisfactory result (you don't want people to think you're up yourself, do you?).

But the survey yielded one stunning result: the French were adjudged the worst tippers in the world.

This would have come as a shock to New Zealanders, most of whom felt the first cold clammy dread of tip guilt at a pavement table in a Paris café.

The very word for tip in French - pourboire, which means "for a drink" - has embedded in the language the notion that if you want to slake your thirst you need to regard the price on the menu as a sort of deposit.

This is France's dirty secret and the world is entitled to an explanation. The country that practically invented the tip is full of bad tippers. C'est insupportable!