But Americans do seem to speak as though their ways were universal, more than other nations. I remember a Canadian who worked near the border expressing her amazement at being asked "do you take normal money?"

Americans, to an absurd degree, are rabidly ethnocentric. I'm not sure why this is; I think it has to do with being the major superpower during the global information explosion era.

I'm speaking as an American myself: I have a very hard time, despite being conscious of it, not thinking of all things American as a baseline for normalcy. I know, intellectually, that American dialects stagnated for centuries after being imported from Britain and eviscerated by Webster, but I still think of "colour" as a foreign and exotic spelling.