In my experience USians is usually used by weird liberals who are in favor of manifest destiny, but are worried about the racist baggage attached to the term. Go to Toronto or Tijuana and insist that the locals are Americans and you’ll get your teeth knocked out.
The Dutch, Austrians, and large amounts of Switzerland are technically Germans. But if suddenly people from the Federal Republic of Germany started going on about how Austrians are also technically Germans, and you should refer to people from FRG as Bundesen, all of Europe would start to freak the fuck out.
In my experience “USians” is usually used by butthurt Spanish speakers who think that because America means one thing in Spanish it has to mean the same thing in every other language.
In my experience “USians” is usually used by butthurt Spanish speakers who think that because America means one thing in Spanish it has to mean the same thing in every other language.
Well, there’s more countries speakers of Spanish, so we have a point, I think.
It’s funny you talk about language nonsense, when so many of the US citizens believe that their dialect is the original English and the UK is a deformed version of it…
No, you don’t have a point. You’re missing the point. The point is that America in English is not the same word as America in Spanish. They’re false friends.
False friends is the linguistics term for two words spelled the same in two languages, but with different meaning. For example, the word “glass” means ice cream in Swedish. We don’t tell the Swedish they’re using the word “glass” wrong, we accept that it has a different meaning in Swedish.
Sometimes the false friends are pretty subtle. The word “må” means “may” in Danish, but “must” in Norwegian. This can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, because unlike the ice cream example above, you don’t get any hints from context. You just have to know.
It’s the same deal with America. English-speaking countries (yes, the UK too), and all of the Nordics for that matter, use a continental model where North and South America are separate continents, and America is shorthand for United States of America. And the superior amount of Spanish speaking countries don’t give them the right to tell English speakers what words should mean in their native language.
To be fair, the last time Germany did that it helped pull the majority of the planet into a very bad time and we as a species picked up new forms of trauma. I’d get a bit twitchy too, but your point is valid
In my experience USians is usually used by weird liberals who are in favor of manifest destiny, but are worried about the racist baggage attached to the term. Go to Toronto or Tijuana and insist that the locals are Americans and you’ll get your teeth knocked out.
The Dutch, Austrians, and large amounts of Switzerland are technically Germans. But if suddenly people from the Federal Republic of Germany started going on about how Austrians are also technically Germans, and you should refer to people from FRG as Bundesen, all of Europe would start to freak the fuck out.
In my experience “USians” is usually used by butthurt Spanish speakers who think that because America means one thing in Spanish it has to mean the same thing in every other language.
Well, there’s more countries speakers of Spanish, so we have a point, I think.
It’s funny you talk about language nonsense, when so many of the US citizens believe that their dialect is the original English and the UK is a deformed version of it…
No, you don’t have a point. You’re missing the point. The point is that America in English is not the same word as America in Spanish. They’re false friends.
False friends is the linguistics term for two words spelled the same in two languages, but with different meaning. For example, the word “glass” means ice cream in Swedish. We don’t tell the Swedish they’re using the word “glass” wrong, we accept that it has a different meaning in Swedish.
Sometimes the false friends are pretty subtle. The word “må” means “may” in Danish, but “must” in Norwegian. This can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, because unlike the ice cream example above, you don’t get any hints from context. You just have to know.
It’s the same deal with America. English-speaking countries (yes, the UK too), and all of the Nordics for that matter, use a continental model where North and South America are separate continents, and America is shorthand for United States of America. And the superior amount of Spanish speaking countries don’t give them the right to tell English speakers what words should mean in their native language.
There are also more native English speakers than Spanish speakers. Land doesn’t talk, only people do
To be fair, the last time Germany did that it helped pull the majority of the planet into a very bad time and we as a species picked up new forms of trauma. I’d get a bit twitchy too, but your point is valid