Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Torpeau-
I guess it depends on which model you use to count your continents. I've always learned America, Antarctica, Africa, Eurasia, and Australia. And I know, there really isn't a single word that sums it up, I use US citizen. American seems ambiguous and Yankee has other connotations depending on where in the states you live. I guess we just have a messy long title for our country name.

It is ironic, I suppose, that the one country that asserts exclusive claim to the term "American" happens to one that contains no territory where Amerigo Vespucci actually made footfall. For that matter, I suppose it's odd that we're so emotionally invested in the name of an Italian explorer as a shibboleth of patriotic identity. But emotional investment — not denotative logic — is what patriotic vocabulary is made of. Why do we use a British beer-drinking song as our national anthem? Why not an Americ…err…a tune composed by a U.S. citizen? Because we were emotionally imprinted with warm fuzzy feelings about this when we were kids?

In the end, "American" will have to be viewed as one of those words with a frame-of-reference set of meanings that need to be sorted out by context, just as "Washington" is both a city and a state, and "Mexico" is used for a city, a state, and a country. In the United States of America, it refers to a country within a hemisphere. In the Organization of American States, it refers to an organization of countries (including the U.S.) all of which are "American" by a different frame of reference.

torpeau said:

I guess our founding fathers decided they wanted their new country to be called the "United States of America" — hence we're "Americans." I wonder what other choices they discussed. Since the 13 original states were likely the first in the New World to be independent from the mother countries (England, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Russia), maybe the founding fathers expected all the colonies in the Americas to eventually join.
Notice that the Confederate States also chose to include "America" in its name.
Anyway, "America" is officially in our name just as "Mexico" is in the name of the the United States of Mexico (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) and they call themselves "Mexicans."

I don't think that your remark about the expectations of the founding fathers is right. Either that or they were very naive, because they surely knew that, while it is true that the U.S. was known to be the first independent nation of America, the other colonies were also initiating their own independence process, even if the struggles were not fully evolved at the moment. Besides, how could they expect the rest of the countries, which had a very different culture, to eventually join in? They were originally a British colony while the rest of the countries to the south were Spanish and Portugese colonies.

As for the Mexico name denoting three separate entities, a city a state and the whole country, there is a big difference with the usage of America/American: Usually in English, America is used to the detriment of the rest of the countries in the continent, since these last ones are consequently referred to as "the Americas". A poster above made a remark about the emotional investment behind the appropriation of the word "America" for the U.S.A., and the same is true for all the other countries of the continent as well, and the reason we find this usage "offensive", as a lot of people say, is the symbolic meaning behind: We don't like to be told that our home is not our home. As jacosta put it quite correctly:

when someone makes a comment like "Let's kick those illegals out of America and send them back to (whichever country south of the Rio Grande)," seems a bit ridiculous.

In my opinion, this serves to show how the words America and American are mainly loaded with a patriotic notion. Therefore, we also have a problem with the use of the phrase "the American way/el sueño americano". What some of you have said about other countries (like Mexico or Colombia) having "Estados Unidos" in their official names does not actually cut it since not one country which has those specific words has chosen to use 'estadunidense' or the 'Estados Unidos' part as their country's identity.

So there's a growing number of people like me, at least in Mexico, who have changed the English usage to "U.S. National" and stick to "estadunidense" in Spanish.