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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of cringing, the adjective you're looking for is 'American'.

I wonder when "America" ceased to mean "the two continents North and South America" and started to mean "USA" in the heads of US citizens. There's a reason why "European" isn't synonymous to "German", and why "Asian" isn't synonymous to "Chinese".

United States of America = America United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland = Britain

He knows how it came into being. I think his question was more along the lines of "should it?"

I'd say "Britain" more commonly refers to Great Britain, not the UK (i.e. Britain == [England, Scotland, Wales, *islands]).

Speaking from a US perspective again, for me "the UK", "England", and "Britain" are all completely synonymous with each other.

> and started to mean "USA" in the heads of US citizens

You're being a little pedantic. It's usually understood to refer to US citizens by just about everyone outside the USA as well, not just US citizens themselves.

For those languages for which this is actually true, you can most likely chalk it up to US cultural influence.

I guess you are being a little bit insensitive by calling him "pedantic".

As an "American" from the South, and having friends in both Central and North, we constantly make fun of the fact that we can't call ourselves Americans the way Europeans and Asians do.

Another "interesting point" though is that the Indigenous population are still called Indians and the the real Indians are not identified as Asians.

You can call yourselves "South Americans" though, and everybody would understand.

Not all taxonomies consider "America" as one continent. In geography school we were taught of North America and South America as different continents. And if you check Wikipedia, you'll see there are several ways to divide the continents, and they cound from 5 to 7 depending on how you look at it, IIRC.

>Another "interesting point" though is that the Indigenous population are still called Indians and the the real Indians are not identified as Asians.

In my corner of Europe we don't consider the "real Indians" as Asians either. Some cultures do, but we prefer to reserve the "Asian" moniker for the far east (Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea etc). I don't see much cultural or historical resemblance between these and Indians.

Yea. I'm from India. And I resent the fact that any reference to 'Asian' means they are referring to the Chinese, Mongoloids or the Japanese. Hell, even most of Russia falls in Asia.

In the UK, "Asian" usually refers to India / Pakistan / Bangladesh.

There's no other word in English to say "from the US". When I'm talking with my Latino friends who don't like me using the word "American", I just say "gringo". But that obviously doesn't work well for general usage.

Yes, there's another word you're expected sometimes to use when traveling in South America: estadounidense. There's no equivalent in English, it would be USian.

> There's no other word in English to say "from the US".

Actually, there is: "US American" [1], though it's rarely used.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/US_American

As I understand it, America = USA is not a US thing, it's an anglophone thing. For most of the history of the continent, if you were an english speaker, you were simply most likely to speak about the bit that's the USA, thus it got abbreviated. All language is littered with abbreviations that literally mean something broader, but has changed meaning for convenience. A car, for an example, technically means anything with wheels, but has changed its meaning to refer to an automobile for personal transportation.

Also, FWIW, my understanding is that the word "european" when used by americans and britons carries a mildly prerogative air of "frenchness". It certainly isn't a purely neutral geographical term.

Is it specifically anglophone? If anything, I think America=USA is a stronger association in some continental European languages. In English it's common to use "American" as an adjective, but not so common to use "America" as a noun to mean the USA, saying things like "I have a cousin in America" or "I took a vacation to America last year" (in both of these cases constructions like "the U.S." or "the States" are more common). But in Greek you'd definitely use "Αμερική" in those cases too, unless you were writing formally (in which case you'd say "Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες" or ΗΠΑ).

Same in Portuguese.

Not so much in Canada. We'll call someone from the US an American, but we don't say America; we'll say the US, instead.. as I just did.

It's been going on since long before you were born. John Adams(our second President) called the United States "America" in his inaugural address. [1]

We use "The Americas" to refer to the continents as a pair, and prepend a cardinal direction to refer to one of them individually.

Citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia call themselves Australians, despite there being other governments on the continent of Australia.

[1]: http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres15.html

Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and some Indonesian islands, if anyone else is curious exactly what else is on the same shelf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_%28continent%29

Many cultures consider "The Americas" to be one continent - America.

That's true, but the United States and most other English-speaking countries do consider them to be separate continents, and that's why we refer to them that way.

I believe "North American" would be suitable. (Sorry, Canada.)

Mexico is actually considered part of North America as well

Well... TIL! (Though, rather obvious thinking about it...) It definitely screws up my generalisation. I thought "North American" would be nice given the U.S. and Canada generally share the same language and culture. Mexico messes with that, slightly. Though, I suppose states like Florida (from my Dexter knowledge) would have similar issues given the high-proportion of Spanish speakers.

Speaking as a Brit, we do (rather ignorantly) generally refer to citizens of the U.S. as "American."

The US and Canada do not really have the same language demographics. 56% of Canada speaks English as a native language, 21% speaks French and Spanish clocks in at 1.2%; in contrast, the US has 80% English, 12.4% Spanish and 0.45% French.

Usually the abbreviation "America" refers to "United States of ...", while if you're referring to the two continents, you refer to "The Americas". And if you want to get more specific, you can refer to North America or South America.

Do Canadians self-identify as living in "America"? I would guess not. But Germans certainly self-identify as European.

They equate "America" with "USA". "Canada", "America", and "Mexico" are located in "North America". And, BTW, "Mexico" is also in "Central America".

It's a cultural/linguistic norm, not a programming problem. Don't try to reason it out as rigorous logic.

I do not. Maybe that would be different if I traveled to the US often. But despite some of our similarities I see Canada as distinctly Canada and I do not live in America (America’s Hat and Canada’s Pants jokes aside).

Here is a great video explaining the history of "America" and its usage around the world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVMZC4y4zXU

tl;dw? Skip to 3:40.

"America" is short for "The United States of America". It's also the only shortened name which doesn't need to be preceded by 'the'. And it's the only single word which can be used to describe people of the US so then it's also been used to refer to the country. Originally 'American' was used to refer to people of British America, an area comprised of the eastern half of present-day US and Canada. Later the term came to refer to just the US.

I'm sensitive to this enough to specify 'US' when that's what I mean -- yet, when Europeans (well, N. Europeans in my experience) say "Americans" they're referring to US people. It's probably because US culture, politics, imperialism etc. intrude into their countries and lives a lot more than Canadians, Mexicans or South Americans do.

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