Or at least the name….

On the About Me page on this site I mentioned that I brought portions of the Marley novel to my writing group every week as it was being written. The other day I happened to glance at something in the finished book that reminded me of an issue someone brought up one night.

In a scene I read for the group, a character refers to the United States simply as “America.” The writer who brought this up is a friend of mine, and her question was worth discussing. Julie had a friend from South America who hated hearing “America” used to mean the United States of America. The friend thought that using “America” in that way was conceited and pretentious.

I’d never considered this a serious problem, though I’ve always been aware the usage is incorrect. North and South America comprise lot of real estate. They take up most of an entire hemisphere. Now that I think about it, I can’t imagine a citizen of Argentina, for instance, saying about someone, “He’s not here, he’s on vacation in America.” No way.

Remember where the name come from? Amerigo Vespucci, one of the earliest European explorers of the new world, was the first person to claim that the lands Christopher Columbus had discovered were new continents and not part of Asia, as Columbus maintained. Eventually this was accepted by the Europeans. A German mapmaker later wrote a book on geography and in it suggested that the new lands be named for Amerigo. Apparently names of continents have to be feminine, and America is the feminine form of Amerigo. So there you have it. Two huge continents named for one guy.

Back to the critique. My answer to this objection was that the incorrect usage was appropriate for the British character who spoke the words. I was well aware that Brits have been in the habit of referring to the United States as “America” for as long as we’ve been a country, and even before that. Luckily, I was backed up by others in the room. I mean, if you’ve read a lot of English novels you can’t escape knowing that factoid. Alistair Cooke, a famous English journalist, had a regular column called “Letter from America.” Call it a colloquialism. Of course, everybody knows that’s it’s not the official name. If an Englishman needs to refer to our president, he doesn’t say “the President of America.” At least, I hope not. Horrors!

Part of the problem is our country’s official given name. You would have thought the founding fathers would have had more creativity. “United States of America” is such a mouthful that it’s no wonder English-speakers on both sides of the Atlantic have looked for something shorter.

We’re not the only country with this problem. Consider our former mother country. What do we call it? England? Britain? Great Britain? England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland? The United Kingdom? The UK? Brexit? Take your pick.

I think an even more flagrant mistake is in using the adjective “American” to mean “of the USA.” I consider myself an “American,” true enough. That usage is pretty well set. But we also have phrases like “the American Dream,” companies like “American Airlines,” policies that might be “un-American,” and philosophies like “the American way of life.” With so many things already staked out, it’s hard to see how we could ever reverse it. No, it’s too late. As I said, it’s colloquial usage and the world has mostly adjusted to this peculiarity.

Sorry, Latin America and Canada, I doubt this will ever change. Hopefully scientific and technical works don’t use “America” as loosely as we do in speech and everyday prose.