Hehehe - You are cheering up a slow work day no end, TE:-) I'm off in a few minutes though so may not be able to catch up till later.

I did assume (remember the old makes an ASS of U and ME line?) that your average Brit is as anti Irish as at least your average Unionist did mean that the average Brit was anti Irish. If it did indeed mean that the Unionists are in fact as apathetic as rest of us Brits I apologise unreservedly. I don't think that was the original meaning though and still stick to my conviction that yer 'average Brit' (whatever that may be) is not anti Irish at all.

A further apology is in order if my thought process are at fault with the phrase about medians and averages as well. I will take you though it so you can tell me where I went wrong.

If there are extremes, there is a median
Medians are averages.

To this poor little Gnomes limited powers of reasoning this seems to mean that the extremes are to be counted in when agreeing what an average is. In this context the implication is that the majority view is tainted because more Brits bash the Irish than support them? To simplify down to simple arithmetic terms if, out of 100 people, 2 earn £1,000,000 pounds per year, one earns £100 per year (the extremes) and 97 earn £1000 a year then the average earnings are a bit over £20,000. Arithmeticaly sound but to base your economy on this would be a bit odd. Basing any average on extremes is flaky territory which is why we use weighted and normalised averages. Mind you, 94.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot anyway... ;-)

And perfectly legitimate when observing trends

Sounds like a justification to use this median/average when classifying the average Brit as being anti-Irish. If it isn't can you clarify just what it is you are trying to prove? Bit much for me I'm afraid!

Anyroads, as I said before, must be off. This here non-average non-football supporting Brit is off to try and buy tickets for the Bolton / Blackburn game so I can take an non-average football supporting American to the game on in a couple of weeks.

Don't ask...

Cheers

DtG