this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
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I do not. That was the whole point of my multiple comments in the original thread. America is the correct noun, in English, to refer to the United States of America.
We can get into definitions of continents if you like. I accept that people from Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking backgrounds primarily talk about a 6 continent model consisting of America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia/Oceania, and Antarctica. I can also accept that because there's no real solid definition of a continent, it's impossible to say that this is wrong per se. I will say that I find it an absolutely baffling grouping to use, and that I myself prefer 6 continents consisting of North and South America, Eurasia, Africa, Oceania, and Antarctica; it makes no sense to me that someone could group the Americas while considering Afroeurasia three continents: to me, either an isthmus like Panama and Suez separates continents, or it does not, and it's weird to split over Suez but not Panama, and even weirder not to merge Eurasia who have no physical separation. (And IMO, once you start separating Europe and Asia, it becomes hard not to justify separating Arabia and India, if we're trying to keep a logical definition.) But continents aren't especially logical. In most of the English-speaking world, the 7 continent model dominates. We talk about North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia/Oceania, and Antarctica. Those are the 7 continents, and while you can disagree with them (as I do!), in most conversations you're just being difficult if you bring up that disagreement in anything more than a very lighthearted way.
The use of the demonym America stems in part from that. Once you reject the notion that "America" is a single continent, it becomes far easier to understand that the demonym "American" can't refer to people from two continents, and so it's very normal to use it to refer to just one country. That country being the United States of America. It's pretty normal to refer to countries by their short form. Czechia a few years back started a big campaign push to specifically ask people to call them that, rather than always using the formal "Czech Republic". Australia rarely gets referred to as the "Commonwealth of Australia", and the fact that Canada is officially "the Dominion of Canada" is rarely even acknowledged by official texts these days. Amusingly, America's southern neighbour has an equally valid claim on the name "United States", since Estados Unidos Mexicanos translates to United Mexican States, or, roughly, United States of Mexico. Latin Americans often get upset at this because in Spanish, the demonym is 'estadounidense', which roughly translates to 'United Statesian'. But that's not a word that exists in English. It's not especially logical even in Spanish, given that logically speaking, estadounidense could also refer to Mexicans. But words are defined by their usage, and in common usage that word unambiguously means American. The same is true in English. American unambiguously, in English, means person or thing from the United States of America. It's silly to get upset by that.
I typically just say "American" too but I don't do all this when I get corrected. It comes across like you're trying to justify being ~~racist~~ ethnocentric.
It is weird to hear someone say "country of America" though when you could just say "the US(A)"
Edit: corrected language
Do you think everyone in America is the same race? And what race do you think they are?
You're right, I should've said xenophobic
Are you being xenophobic when you use the term American? Or is it just common parlance? What is it when you tell people how to address themselves?
*ethnocentric is a better term actually, after more thinking
Yeah, when I use the term "American" to refer to US Americans, I'm being ethnocentric. If I were to be corrected and then -instead of accepting the correction- double down and argue, that would certainly seem like I had a problem with being an equal to Latin Americans
There is space for America to refer to the continents of North and South America, and also be short hand for the United States of America the same way that the United Mexican States is called Mexico.
Inferring that it makes anyone less equal is ethnocetric, if anything.
I don't believe ethnocentric is the correct term (I mean, clearly. I don't believe there's anything wrong with it. But if there has to be a label you can apply, ethnocentric isn't it.). American is not an ethnicity. Asian Americans and African Americans are every bit as American as white Americans and Latino Americans. The only ethnicity with a better claim than all those others are Native Americans.