Americans voted "coolest nationality"; Canadians "cooler than Belgians" (just): global poll
Americans have been voted the world’s “coolest nationality” and Canadians among the least cool, in an international poll, which ranks the Belgians the “least cool” of all.
30,000 people across 15 countries were asked to name the coolest nationality in an online poll conducted by Badoo.com, the world’s largest social network for meeting new people.
While Belgians ranked last in the Badoo poll, Canadians ranked fourth from last, making them marginally less cool than the Germans but cooler than both the Turks and Poles, in addition to the Belgians.
“There are more important things in life than being cool,” said Lloyd Price, Badoo’s director of marketing. “Canada might not be one of the coolest countries in the world but it is one of the most civilized. Like the Queen, Canada is so uncool, it’s cool. And proud of it.”
Plus, it could have been worse, given Canada’s reputation for being almost proverbially uncool. Or, as Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian writer and former Liberal leader once put it, “Paris, Texas stands as a metaphor for broken dreams; Paris, Saskatchewan just sounds ridiculous.”
Being cool is all about not being square. “But Canada,” an American pundit once claimed, “is a country so square that even the female impersonators are women.”
“It’s probably uncool to point that there, in fact, a load of cool Canadians,” says Price.
But Canada, nonetheless, has given the world everyone from Leonard Cohen to Keanu Reeves; Jim Carrey to Seth Rogen; Joni Mitchell to KD Lang and Avril Levigne; Mike Myers to Michael Cera; architect Frank Gehry to… the list goes on.
True, this still doesn’t make Canadians as cool as Americans.
“Americans are the dudes who invented ‘cool,'” said Price. “They still have the coolest leader, Obama; the coolest performers, like Lady Gaga and Jay-Z; and Steve Jobs of Apple, the coolest man in technology, who has even made geeks cool.”
COOLEST NATIONALITIES
Rank
Nationality
1.
American
2.
Brazilians
3.
Spanish
4.
Italians
5.
French
LEAST COOL NATIONALITIES
1.
Belgians
2.=
Poles
2.=
Turks
4.
Canadians
5.
Germans
