Cultures or Personalities?

I love to classify and generalise about things, two traits that are not good to have at once. Still as my friends have noted over the years, I do both a lot and it has lead me today to think whether I can explain an incident, like the one I am about to describe, as an example of cultural differences, or simply a personality difference.

I am currently working with an interesting guy from Canada. I must say I havn't really gotten to know many Canadians before, (with the exception of some online friends) so I was a little surprised at just how like they are to americans in many ways, but yet their colonial origins also show very strongly. They sound like americans but they think like Brits! What was interesting was that he made a comment today that went along the lines of "I hope we don't have to take it in the ass and take one for the team by staying behind today, i have plans for dinner". It was quite amusing at the time as it was in referrence to today being the start of the busiest period at work in the year. I immediately decided to put it up on the quotes page. Later in the day in hushed tones we were told that one of our co-workers recently had his girlfriend up and walk out on him with NO notice. This woman had been going out with him for 5 years and they had plans to go on holidays etc, he said he was going out to the shop, did she want anything and then when he got back she had left and hopped on a plane to New Zealand! No warning nothing, a bizare story and not something I would personally be talking about openly near the person in question. At any rate the person in question came up to myself and two other people (one of whom was the Canadian, Elliott) who were talking about his situation and Elliott, just turned to him and said "we were just talking about your situation". The other person and myself were just flawed, it seemed ... so inappropriate, but Elliott didn't even bat an eyelid. What caused me no end of confusion was shortly after this it came out that I had quoted Elliott on his earlier comment, immediately he was very concerned as to who had seen the quote and would I please take it down immediately. His reasoning it seems was that it was highly inappropriate in the workplace to mention anything that could be construed in any way about being derrogatory to gays and that you couldn't possibly have something like that quoted.

So there it is, at first I thought it was his culture, ie the repressed conservative north American views on sexuality and expression (ie the quote) and the forthrightness and confrontationlism in the form of his interaction with the person who lost his partner. Then I thought maybe it was his personality. Who knows? One thing is for sure, the more I see of different things, the more I belive I CAN accurately classify them, but whether or not that is just my perception, or whether it is reality ... thats a different story :)