When returning from holiday, one starts to think of holidays

[fivemack]

By 'south of the Rio Grande', I mean 'into Mexico' rather than 'anywhere south of 31N' - I thought this was standard usage, but various of my friends in Cambridge interpreted it the other way.

[Poll #1545665]

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I've been to Australia and New Zealand (work trip back in the 1980s), so the count I put in the poll is correct at least by your definition.

(I'm pretty sure Australia was an island when I was in gradeschool. I'm absolutely sure that I bought a photo book called Australia: The Biggest Island while I was there, since I still have it.)

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Australia: The Biggest Island

Rather unfair to Tasmania et al, that. Although I suppose The Australian Mainland: The Biggest Island doesn't really scan.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

It's a continent in Jules Verne's 1867 In Search of Castaways/Children of Captain Grant.

No controversy is mentioned on the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_%28continent%29), though "the island continent" is included as a literary synonym.

Conventionally, Australia the continent includes Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. New Zealand's got its own submerged continent, Zealandia, but they can be bundled together as Australasia.

Of course, I grew up in USSR thinking of Iceland as part of Europe and Jamaica as part of North America, so all these definitions are pretty wobbly.