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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

There are two countries with the words "United States" in the name: the USA and Mexico. There is only one country with the word "America" in it. So "America" as an informal name for the USA is appropriate.

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it is not appropriate for non-US people since the name "America" clash with how they name the continent (America), so they believe that Americans are "stealing" the name of the continent for themselves. While Americans don't think so because they don't even think there is such a continent, there are 2 continents for them.

As an American, I believe continents are a useless fiction that don’t properly account for how land is actually divided on the crust of the Earth and disregards small continental areas which ought to be accounted for if we’re to believe Europe and Asia are different continents. There are also two different six continent models taught in the world in addition to the seven continent model I was taught: Europe and Asia as Eurasia and North and South America as the Americas.

Personally I don’t care what you call us in other languages, but in English it’s just “Americans”.

> since the name "America" clash with how they name the continent (America)

There are two continents, "North America" and "South America". To refer to the whole, you pluralize it as "the Americas".

The number of continents and their names vary between cultures and languages. In Latin America, the Americas are considered a single continent called America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number

I assume someone from one of those cultures would not call it America.

Major places (and IMO it is a mark of the importance of a place) have different names in different languages. London does, Germany does, Japan does,....

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