#it’s not North American South American USAmerican

[artemis-crimson]

I don’t think I have petty hated something as much as everyone saying USAmerican. I want to lobotomize everyone who uses that fucking phrase and peaceably euthanize whatever useless fecal homunculus came up with that stupid goddamn by putting a potato gun full of anthrax in their mouth and pulling the trigger.

[theatrekidenergy]

Y’all fuck with the Texas shaped waffles

[lizzardtown]

Look I understand that people want a word that differentiates Americans (from the Americas) and Americans (from the US) but jesus christ USian is a terrible term please oh my god it's horrible

[cogentranting]

.

[eternalpeacenosuffering]

Im a black South African so I dont really have skin in the game in regards to the whole KKK thing but maybe if black Americans don’t want to be compared to the KKK they shouldnt join a racist boys club that murders terrorises and tortures people in the Third World. And maybe not tell a North Korean women they hope she gets lynched

Exactly. Like this is prime KKK behavior. I literally cannot blame anyone who calls them all kinds of comparisons to white supremacists. The usamerican chauvinism fucking took over.

[what-even-is-thiss]

In English, North America and South America are two different continents but in Spanish they’re just one continent and continents are a made up concept and what constitutes as a continent has no useful definition that fits all of our regular lists of continents and why are Europe and Asia and Africa three different continents in the first place and is Australia actually just a very big island?

Anyways that’s why I don’t type things like USAmerican because in English they’re just Americans but I understand why some people do get annoyed with that but at the same time I’ve seen zero Spanish speakers in my personal life argue for speaking that way in English and I guess my point is that we should probably be more aware of how certain people see themselves and be respectful of that but also at the same time I’m an English speaking person in an English speaking country and if I use America to refer to what we call The Americas in my everyday life people will assume I’ve made a mental typo or that I’m being contrarian and if I tried to make that a thing in my everyday speech patterns I’d come off as a pretentious idiot. If I’m speaking Spanish that’s a different story. Then yeah there’s other words for US Americans like estadounidense. Or famously gringo, more colloquially.

I’m not looking to start arguments here. Like I said I totally get why people make that distinction. But there’s also like the nuances of the lived reality of living in certain cultural contexts that I think people forget about.

I’m not here to tell you to not make that distinction in your speech. I’m not even here to tell you that you’re not allowed to be frustrated about it. I’m just here to explain why I don’t do that and why most English speaking people don’t and why it’s not inherently malicious when people do. Like if someone fully dismisses your perspective on the issue and how you view your own identity yes they’re the asshole. But also generally in English it’s The Americas or North, Central, and South America. And yes maybe that’s stupid but so is the existence of Europe as a concept and we all seem to believe that Europeans are a real thing.

And to reiterate. I’m not trying to tell anybody how to speak or how to feel here. Just trying to insert some nuance into this conversation. Because people I call Americans and you might call USAmericans are only gonna call ourselves Americans. That’s just how we view ourselves, how we understand our own identity as a nation. And some people will be jerks about it. But many of us are also just living in the world we live in, referring to ourselves in the way we always have, not aiming to tell anyone else how they ought to view themselves.

I’m American. Soy estadounidense. Some stuff unfortunately gets lost in translation.

Also continents don’t exist. If we try to get rid of the concept of continents we’d all be too confused at all times to have these disagreements. Confusion superiority. We go by tectonic plates. California is on the same continent as Japan now.

[zzxid]

USAmericans sounds as stupid as Brazilamericans or CanadAmericans. The United States of America is the only one of 35 countries in North and South America that has America in the name of the country. No one thinks you're refering to South Americans from Chile or Paraguay or North Americans from Canada or Barbados when you say Americans. They think "Oh, like the citizens of the United States of America."

yankee pelotudo who never talked with other regions doesn't know latinos call ourselves americans too because we're part of the americas, and we use "estadounidense" to refer to people in USA and "americano" to everyone in the americas, gringo troglodita doesn't know "USAmerican" was coined by latinos who we're tired of USA-centrism and to say "stop talking like we're not american too". ignorant yank doesn't know the americas are seen as one continent by many latinos even if culturally, so for us "America" refer to the union of North and South.

The poll was exactly to show how many cultural discussions are ignored or misscontructed because people have USA-centric views on things. And if you're not a yankee then gotta work on your us centrism.

[creatingblackcharacters]

Similar AAVE question to the recent anon - I was always taught that “ain’t” was AAVE and thus not acceptable for me (a white southern-ish USAmerican girl who grew up just south of Baltimore) to say. I didn’t see that one specifically come up in the lesson (many apologies if it was there and I missed it each time I read it), so I wanted to ask - was this one correct? A lot of these kinds of rules I was taught turned out not to be accurate over the years, so I was hoping to check in.

I don't know if Maryland is considered the South 😅 I feel like Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee are like... "The South", and then everything below that is "The Deep South".

Just checked, so apparently it is under the Mason Dixon line! Learned something new.

Anywho, as to your question, same idea as said recent anon:

[vampmilf]

usamerican self centrism off the charts once again in the tags of this post where i make a joke about how when a post asks to share where you're from, usamericans are the only ones to say their state instead of the country

"its helpful to us" this is not just about you though. i know this is hard to understand but not everyone on this website is usamerican and if the question is to the broader public asking which country everyone is from, this is not just about you. the answers should not make sense only to you.

"america is very big and culturally very different" are you under the assumption that there are no regional cultural differences in other countries? i can tell you with absolute certainty that yes, even countries smaller than half the north american continent have regional differences. shocker, i know. every country in europe has regionally different cultures and history, maybe with the exception of the countries that are only one big city. i can tell you from just the two countries that ive lived in (germany, norway) there are big cultural differences depending on what part you live in. theres differences between west and east germany, theres differences between people living on the north coast vs north-east coast vs in the south vs in the middle of the country. theres differences in regions depending on what other country they border with. some dialiects dont even understand each other. the regions have different history leading to different cultures leading to different mindsets and behavioural patterns, it is very noticeable to germans. you will still never catch a german answering a polls with "im from nrw" bc thats not helpful for anyone and even though there are these big regional differences, on a broader level, germany as a whole still has one uniting culture. plus, you still do live in the same country which means that the economy, laws, etc define your lived experiences (although even here there are regional differences) which is why the question is "where are you from?"

norway even has two different languages, that are spoken in different parts of the country, and hundreds of regional dialects. if you told norwegians in the north and in the south theyre essentially the same they would look at you like youre crazy. still they would all answer with "im from norway"

there are a lot of countries around the world that speak different languages in different regions of it. theres countries that are now one big whole, but used to be two or more smaller countries that then got joined together, combining different languages, cultural dresses, traditions, etc. i can assure you people from every country around the world will tell you that there is distinct cultural differences within the country that they would notice immediately, but on an international poll asking where they are from, they will still answer with their country.

usamericans are the only ones giving you letter codes for different states. and if youre thinking "well i dont notice any difference between two people from the same country even if theyre from different regions" i can assure you, that is how the rest of the world feels about usamericans. your regional differences are there and noticeable to you, but not to the rest of the world. to us, youre from the usa. that is it.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

People will call me racist for disliking the Hades game designs but when I ask them why they think it is awesome representation for South Asian and African characters to sound british in the same game that has more blond people than POC, suddenly all I hear is crickets

The Hades game has many positive attributes but they did the classic USAmerican "representation" stuff, and they Americanized it so much that even that representation is racist 😂 I mean it is already racist to forcefully diversify a pantheon of Mediterranean gods because they "all look the same" or something (Sorry that North Mediterranean Indigenous populations exist, I suppose). But they also, in the old classic western fashion they made many characters look either Germanic-AngloSaxon or ONLY one of the minorities these Germanic-AngloSaxons are familiar with). And of course they act like this is American minority representation because nothing screams United States of America like ancient Greek gods and characters in chitons.

[conkreetmonkey]

I have a weird, muddy opinion on how people on this site call The United States of America "USAmerica." Yeah, it works, and it removes any confusion about whether you're talking about the country or the landmass, but at the same time, it feels clunky? USAmerica just feels... idk, it's like you couldn't say it out loud without sounding goofy? You can say "the USA" out loud and it sounds good and makes sense, but at the same time the "the" makes it a bit awkward gramatically, and you can't just say "I'm from USA," but you can say, in text form, "I'm from USAmerica."

THEN there's the fact that people from that country are typically referred to as "Americans," and things from there as "American." When someone says "America," you don't think about the two connected continents the term could technically be referring to, you just think about the United States of America. It's an unusually "built" country within the region, made up of 51 smaller, unified nation-states that have combined into one very large, culturally and geographically disjointed country under one sprawling government, where every state, now functionally more of a province, retains the ability to have differing laws and economic policies, yet must answer to the grand government that controls them all as a whole, like if every country in Europe was ruled by one overseeing organization but were free to remain distinct as mini-nations rather than homogenized provinces. Two USAmerican states are far more different in legislation and culture than, say, two Canadian provinces are.

Given this, it makes sense for the country to simply be named "The United States of America." It's a bunch of states from America that are united into one big Voltron of a nation. Of course, though, you can't just say something like "this book is a great work of United States of America-ian literature," due to the way the English language works. Within the framework of English grammar, ideally, a country needs an adjective form of its name to concisely describe people and things from there, and while there are no hard rules as to how to go about that to my knowledge, there are a few different ways. You can apply a prefix to the country's name such as "ish" (British, Scottish, Turkish), "ian" (Brazillian, Russian, Indian), "ese" (Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese), "i" (Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni), or "an" (Guatemalan, German, Mexican), or if it sounds good you can just get funky with it and change a vowel or two (Norse, French, Dutch, Malagasy). And then there's Iceland with the "ic" (because they're special).

So BASICALLY, from THAT standpoint, using "American" as the USA's adjective makes sense. It flows well, does what it needs to. The problem, of course, is the overlap with the name of the landmasses. Technically, when one says "South American," they could be referring to either the continent of South America, or the south of the USA. Same with "North American." Now, nobody actually uses either of those terms to describe regions of the country, probably due to this overlap. A USAmerican could simply say "I'm from the north" or "I'm from a southern state," and you would understand given the context of them being a USAmerican. But then again, they couldn't just simply drop the country and compass-ional (whatever tf the term is) region in the same clause like people from any other country could without it sounding weird. "I'm from South France" makes sense as a sentence, as does "This plant grows in Northern Australia." "I was born in the South of the United States of America" is clunky and overly verbose, yet the lack of a proper country name without a "the" throws a wrench into that.

So what do we (typically) do? Just say "American" and let context do the work, clarifying if neccesary. "I'm from Southern America" obviously is not intended to apply to the continents, although it technically could. The reader, simply due to the context of knowing that South America is a continent and "America" usually refers to the USA unless otherwise stated, understands that the writer almost certainly means they're from a place like Texas or Louisiana, rather than Argentina or Chile. This way of writing/speaking is imprecise and requires unspoken context, but it gets the job done. America the country is a weird case in terms of its makeup, and that's reflected in its name. You're not referring to one country, you're referring to 51 micro-nations held together with one big fat federal government spread over them, like the thick plastic wrap holding a pallet of crates, boxes and sacks together as one shippable unit. And besides, nobody ever says "America" to refer to both continents, even though they technically could. They say "The Americas," because while technically one region, NA and SA are both very distinct and barely physically connected at all, held together by a single small landbridge (that has a canal though it now anyways, so you can't walk from one continent to the other without crossing water anymore).

So, in conclusion, idk, the term "USAmerica" removes the needless complexity of situational context, but it's somehow clunkier-feeling than the preexisting norm of just saying "America." I use and will continue to use the term USAmerica for brevity's sake since it's the norm on this site, but I'd certainly never use it anywhere else. America is an unusual country, and its name reflects that. A square peg in a language made of round holes, that can still fit if you turn it sideways a little. idk. I suppose the only real lesson here is that a) American exceptionalism is unintentionally portrayed in the language the country speaks, and b) English has a weird grammar system where things that are objectively correct within it sometimes don't "feel right" for no reason other than lacking succinctness.

[hatesaltrat]

What is wrong now with "US-American"? How else to differentiate between the 35 different nations that are in the Americas? 'American' is already the name from someone from the either the North- or South-American continent. Like Asian, African and European (etc) also do. It's not really our problem you guys couldn't think of a country name, but yeah can't really blame you either when your parent nations is equally as uninspiring with "United Kingdom" :P.

If ya see Friend, it’s not US-American, it is USamerican.

It’s the progressive doublespeak that we oppose.

While anyone with any monicker of education fully grasps that the USA is a nation within N America and clinically the term “American” means anyone residing within the Americas not just the USA, the colloquial term American has come to mean a US resident. USamerican is every bit as offensive as Latinx. It’s newspeak garbage and we fully reject it.

[mesetacadre]

ok big geography question what is in your opinion the proper split of the americas by continent

Okay I'm going to be using this map as a reference so people who don't have a very clear mental image of the geography can follow along. Thanks to Bigstock for sponsoring this tumblr post

I think to properly answer this question you have to first figure out what you want the continent classification to be for. I talked about this in the old blog but continents are a really inconsistent thing with no actual rigurous definition that can be stretched or changed depending on your goals. Personally, I don't think it's useful because of this nebulousness and that at the root of some of these problems is the fact that maybe not every piece of land above the ocean should be classified into a continent. For the sake of this ask I'm going to pretend that I don't believe this and play along.

In my opinion, if it had to all be classified, I'd just make it all a single continent, named America, and make any other divisions just regions of the continent. Basically every other continent is also divided internally like this: South East Asia, East Africa, Central Europe, Southwest Asia / Middle East (colonizer name but I'm including it for the sake of example), North Africa. These are just some examples of popular divisions of continents that can have their utility. Nobody asks that eastern Europe be its own continent, despite the differences with the west, or that North Africa be separated from the rest of Africa. Why should the Americas be different? (it's so canadians and usamericans don't feel icky being grouped in with the Poors to the south, but don't tell them that. Why else would some people include Mexico in Central or even South America?). We already have the same kind of division with the same naming convention as in other continents.

As to defining the subdivisions of America, I think an interesting place to start is Greenland. Geographically it's closer to something which we can all agree could be classified as part of the Americas, that being Canada. It's part of the north American plate, but historically it has more ties with European colonizers. So Greenland is I think a good example of why we have to keep our intentions clear with classifying the continents. A purely geographical criteria is much more straightforward but maybe less useful when talking about broad groups of people. However, a definition that's more rooted in "cultural" and historical similarities can easily turn into Huntington's clash of civilizations theory, see his division below

I find it very funny how he places Japan into its own civilization while at the same time he groups vast regions into one. It's also extremely racist. Moving on.

Personally I'd put Greenland in America not just because of geographical criteria but also because the indigenous people of Greenland have closer ties to those of the Canadian islands, Labrador and such.

I do not think Central America should be its own continent, even if we're making North and South America their own continents, but it is interesting as a region within America. I'll get to it last.

I find myself agreeing with the Panama Isthmus / Darién gap / Panama-Colombia border as the northern border of South America, simply because there is no better place to put it. I guess the part of the Andes that cuts Colombia in half could be an option, but it feels wrong to make any part of Colombia not South America. Again, continents are not a coherent classification so it often does just come down to feel. You could argue the Guatemala-Belize-Mexico border is another option, which it can be, but there isn't a good geographical feature to divide it. With the Panama region, you get a really clear divide because of the sudden change in width, and it roughly aligns with the plates as well.

But what is there here?

There is no major river and the mountain ranges all go in a different direction to the intended division. Look at the northern part of the border, it's literally just a straight line going through jungle that's identical on both sides. This is not the place to divide a continent in half, I'm sorry. I guess the Caribbean plate does roughly meet the north american plate here, but to me the plates can just be a reinforcing argument, not a deciding factor. Using only country borders to decide the continents is very sloppy IMO, especially if those country borders were decided by defining straight lines between rivers and latitudes.

So that's where I think the North-South America border should lie, somewhere in the Darién gap between Panama and Colombia. I wouldn't use the Panama Canal because that's manmade. By the same metric we don't consider canals rivers, I wouldn't consider canals a worthy feature to divide things at.

About the Caribbean, most maps place the north/south divide at the last island chain in the lesser Antilles and make everything else North America, but to me it makes a bit more sense to place the border between the greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas, Haiti, Dominican republic, and Puerto Rico) and the lesser Antilles (the chain of smaller islands that go from Puerto Rico to Venezuela). Again, the ambiguity of continents forces for some decisions to be vibe based. And to me, putting Trinidad and Tobago and Granada in North America is wrong. The difference in size between the two Antilles and the presence of a US Colony Territory makes a good enough justification even if it's iffy.

This is why a Central America in the context of a single American continent is better than making it its own continent or a region of either a South or North American continent. I am a bit more orthodox in what I'd consider to be Central America, the entire Caribbean island chain/cluster plus the traditional central american countries. This time I'm kinder to a border on the southern border of Mexico, because it's not as significant a limit as The North-South divide, and Central America ending in Guatemala has a historical precedent in the form of the short lived Federal Republic of Central America. Cuba feels much more comfortable in the same category as, say, Honduras but different from like. Miami. It also does alleviate the where-does-the-Antilles-fit issue.

So yeah, that's my answer, if you force me to put everything into a continent. If it were up to me there would be three continents, America, Afro-Eurasia and Antarctica, leave every island out of it and permanently kill the continent as a category.

As a side note, while looking for a map of the Americas, I found this godawful one and I had to share

The shading, the apparent Alaskan independence from a US-Canada union, Mexico stretches to Panama. I think this would be a good candidate for EmperorTigerstar's (now defunct) youtube series on bad maps

[vixendoe]

why *is* usamerican the new term. i've never heard someone refer to canada or any other country in north or south america as american. is it an attempt to try and shift the label of 'american' to mean 'person who lives on the continent of north or south america' or is it smth else? like it doesn't matter i'm just curious

[thisbibliomaniac]

I think if we see people from non-US North and South American countries saying "USian" or "USAmerican" they should then exclusively be referred to as "American" since that's supposedly the point of the term, to include them in the continental residency... see how much they actually like it lol.

But let's be real, does anyone from the non-US continental Americas actually use those, or is it just insufferable Euros and self-aggrandizing Americans?

Yeah

[lesbianrustcohle]

obviously it's preferable to say "the usa" or "the us" or "the states" over "america," those are all real readable words and i think that's reasonable and not stupid

usamerican (one word! not even "US American"!) drives me fucking crazy though. for one, slamming an initialism and a word together does not make a new word. that's not how english works like ever? i'm not talking prescriptively here, it breaks the actual descriptive rules we use and i can't think of anything else that breaks this rule. and for two, what self-respecting north american or south american who is not from the states would call themselves just "an american" in english and risk being mistaken for being from the states? come, now. let's be reasonable here!

virtue signaling / moral scrupulosity OCD ass bullshit