America and American

[ANNE V. GILBERT]

Don:

> Interesting.  I'm a 35 year-old Canadian with ten years of crossing
> many borders and living overseas with groups of Americans and
> Canadians (among others) under my belt. I've never once come
> across a Canadian who claimed to be "American".
>
> I daresay that in the English-speaking world the issue rarely pops
> up outside of academic circles. In Canadian newspapers, US citizens
> are Americans.
>
> If Mexicans are from the United States of Mexico, one can understand
> why they see the United States of America as a misnomer. Here's a
> modest proposal: why not change the name of the country to the "United
> States of Washington"? Aren't you all, in a very real sense,
> "Washingtonians"?
>
> While indeed that's a cumbersome epithet, invariably it would be
> shortened to "Washers". That rolls off the tongue quite nicely.
>
> Even better, a Canadian with a certain comic sensibility might come
> to be known as, erm, a "Dryer". <g>

OK.  Then what would people like me, who live in Washington *State* refer to
themselves as?  I had a bad enough time when I lived in Texas, and people
there thought "Washington", meant D.C., unless I prefaced it with "Seattle",
and then I'd get remarks that suggested Seattle was jammed up near the North
Pole or some such, but that's a different story.
Anne G