America is a continent, not a country
America is a continent, not a country
Posted Aug 14, 2024 12:52 UTC (Wed) by Delicieuxz (guest, #172896)In reply to: America is a continent, not a country by jkingweb
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In Spanish (which is the dominant language of America), there's "estadounidenses", which translates to United-Statesian. The shorter form for which would be USian.
In French, there's états-unien, which again translates to United-Statesian.
In Italian, there's statunitense, which is again United-Statesian.
In German, there's US-Amerikaner, which translates to US-American - as opposed to Canadian-American, Peruvian-American, Bolivian-American, etc.
In Canada, we rarely use the term America to refer to the US, or American to refer to a US citizen. We usually call the US the US, and a person from the US simply a US citizen, from the US, or from the States. Personally, I use the term USian all the time now.
I've seen it said on occasion "but Mexico's full name is the United States of Mexico, so wouldn't there be confusion there?" And that's not correct, as the full name of Mexico is actually The United Mexican States.
There's a document I saw on the Library of Congress' website which says that the trend of referring to US citizens as Americans wasn't popularized until the 20th century, and happened as a result of the US becoming an empire. So, it's an imperialist slang.
The continent America, with north and south sub-continents (like Eurasia has Europe and Asia sub-continents) was named America centuries before the US existed, and the US from its beginning was named merely "of" the continent America. In fact, in 1783, right before the US became a country, the states were being referred to as the united states of north America. Then the name was shortened to the US of A, but the America in the name always referred to the continent.
So, I don't feel comfortable calling the US by a name that misappropriates what belongs to 35 different countries, or its people's nationality by a term that applies to all the people of America. It's a misnomer and misappropriation, and is basically identity theft for the sake of aggrandizing and reinforcing the imperialist mindset in an impererialist state.
And I cringe a bit when people claim the term for the collective landmass of north and south America is "the Americas", as "the Americas" is plural, referring to multiple landmasses at once. The fact that "Americas" is plural testifies that, as a singular landmass, its name is America.