America and American

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Tuesday, February 19, 2002 6:19 am -0800 James Smith
<jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

> Just my limited experience, but I knew several
> Canadians in the 60's who, when they heard USians
> refer to themselves as Americans, made it clear that
> Canadians were Americans also.

And the rest of the time, Canadians say forcefully "I'm not an American,
I'm a Canadian!"

The point that DInIs makes about United States of Brazil, etc. is the
reason that I usually get a bit frustrated with the claim that people from
the US should not be referred to as 'Americans'.

The closest similar example I can think of is South Africa/Africa, but then
you can distinguish between people from South Africa and Botswana or
Lesotho as South Africans vs southern Africans.

I suppose we could say people from the US are 'national Americans' and
people from North/South America are 'continental Americans'.

What are people doing with the epithet for people-from-Congo, now that
there are two countries with that name?

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320