this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Whether it's one continent or two, the point is that it's bigger than the United States. At least I've always studied that Americans are people who live in America, either from Canada, United States, Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina... Then you can divide them between North Americans and South Americans.
I mean, that's fine, but no one world-wide is going to hear "American" and think anything but "a citizen of The United States of America". So, what's the point of trying to push it as such? For all the hate American citizens get, you'd think you'd want to separate yourself as much as possible from the title. Canadians certainly won't like being called Americans, that's for sure.
Yes, it is much bigger than the United States, though not for our lack of trying. We had quite a century or so where we tried to conquer, buy, or steal every bit of land we could.
Today, American is still much bigger then the United States, but we US Citizens don't even really have good vocabulary for just US vs the rest of the Americas.
But English, being a de facto universal language, has good creativity to invent new words, either from native speakers or from foreign influences. For example, the word "D'oh" didn't exist until Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) popularized it. And I think the word "meme" didn't exist either 40 or 50 years ago.
I think a good way to know that is to read newspapers from 100 years ago or older, and see how people from US were called.