American-ness [was RE: even my dumb nontechnical anime group gets it -- why don't we?]

[Owen Byrne]

Except that other countries don't usurp the continent's name. When we say
"Arabs" we don't mean someone
from the United Arab Emirates, and Africans don't all come from South
Africa.
On the other hand the continent's name is North America. They have only
usurped part of the name.

I wonder what you do call someone from the UAE? And I would love to see the
inanity that would result if France decided to rename itself "United States
of Europe" and started using "European" as a synonym for "French."

Owen


----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Prescod" <paul@prescod.net>
To: "Gary Lawrence Murphy" <garym@canada.com>
Cc: "'Forging Oregonian Religious Kants'" <FoRK@xent.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 7:13 PM
Subject: Re: American-ness [was RE: even my dumb nontechnical anime group
gets it -- why don't we?]


> Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
> >
> > >>>>> "I" == Ian Andrew Bell <fork@ianbell.com> writes:
> >
> >     I> Canadians don't like to be called Americans (for the record)
> >     I> not because we're boorish, but because we're struggling with
> >     I> our own sense of identity like a confused teenager.
> >
> > Nonesense.  You've been consuming too much CanWest 'who are we?' bs.
> >
> > We don't like to be called Americans because ...
>
> Because "American" is understood around the world to mean "resident of
> America" and "America" is understood around the world to be the short
> form name of the phrase "United States of America." There really is
> nothing deep, complicated, political or sociological about the issue. If
> the the Canada was known as the Royal Dominion of America and the US was
> known as "the Western Democratic Commonwealth" then "American" would
> mean Canadian and "Western" would mean American.
>
>  Paul Prescod
>
>
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>