Jophiel wrote:
Almalieque wrote:
This translates into The United States Nation of the American continent, so to shorten "The United States" (a country) to "America" (two continents) is silly.
Says you. A whole lot of people worldwide over the course of last couple centuries disagree.
The name of the nation is not "The United States" with "...of America" unofficially added in case anyone gets confused but rather...
CIA World Factbook wrote:
conventional long form: United States of America
...so using the "America" portion of the name isn't any more or less "silly" than using the "United States" portion. However, "American" has the benefit of being less of a mouthful.
I didn't say it was unofficially added..... I simply broke down how the name was made.
Many countries official names are much longer than what we call them. For example, many countries start their names with "Democratic/Republic/People of xyz". In these cases the first parts are not unique as many countries are "Democratic/Republic/People of". The unique part is usually the "xyz", as it usually only can refer to two nations total.
The equivalent of calling the U.S "Americans" because it has the word "America" in their name is calling the Chinese people "People" because their name has "People" in it. If you're going to abbreviate, that's fine, but you abbreviate the unique part of your name. You don't abbreviate the part that isn't unique to your nation. That is, unless you have no problem with the term "people" solely referring to the Chinese?
Belkira wrote:
It's your lame attempt to tell us that we have no identity because we call ourselves "Americans" after the continent we live on, which also holds other nations. To that end, you want to prove to us how stupid it is to call ourselves "Americans" and our products "American" if we won't even bother to call the language we speak "American."
Honestly, you were very close, but no dice.
I'm not proving it's stupid to call ourselves "Americans" because our language isn't called "American". I'm pointing out the fact that people don't call our language "American" because that's just stupid, but that's no different than calling our citizens and products "American" as well.
For whatever reason, we see the stupidity when referring to our spoken language, but not with our citizens, products and services. I was hoping if I pointed out the stupidity in calling our language "American", you would see the resemblances in everything else we call "American".
Think about it... Regardless of it's accuracy, it's ok to call this country America, the people American, with American services and American products, but we cant' say "We speak American", just like we say "Speaking Chinese"?. If we didn't pwn the word "America/n", then you would have a point, but we did, so what's another misuse?