Agree about the person in the OP engineering a chance to have a go at someone.
People don’t normally refer to the continent when they say where they’re from. When US citizens say they come from America, it’s (obviously) not the continent they’re referring to, it’s an abbreviation for USA.
If there were a country called “The Discordant States of America”, I can see people from there getting annoyed that people assume “from America” = from the USA. But even here you’d have to be grown up about things if USA is a superpower with a culture many people worldwide are familiar with, and DSA is not.
I’m living in Asia right now, and I’m proud to consider myself European (the differences between Euro cultures don’t seem so big from outside…). But if someone asks where I’m from: I say Britain.
I don’t think I have ever identified as American or from the USA when asked where I am from, I always answer Texas. So even I find American rather vague, be a bit like saying Europe.
[QUOTE=Bo Diddley]
“Say, where you from?”
“South America.”
"Say what?"
“I said, South America.”
“You don’t look like no South American to me!”
“I’m still from South America.”
“What part?”
“South Texas.”
"Ha haa!"
[/QUOTE]
That’s a pet peeve of mine: the Urals are not to me an obvious cultural or physical boundary. They’re out in the center of the Eurasian landmass and nowhere near the European peninsula. And culturally of course fugeddaboutit.
In my mind, no matter what anyone says, the most generous I will be with the European boundary is White Sea-Volga-Caspian sea, and even then it feels like Europe should still be vaguely west of that.
I generally assume people in other countries aren’t aware of the complete geography of the US, even if they are perhaps more aware of cities here from movies and stuff than I am of places there. For example, I can name a couple of big cities in Belize or Egypt, but if someone said to me, “I’m from Beni Suef” or something like that, I’d have literally no concept of where that is.
So, if someone asks me where I’m from when I’m traveling, I’ll usually say, “I’m from California in the United States.” I could probably get away with just saying California, since most everyone knows it from movies, but I suspect that if I was from . . .Indiana or Arkansas, I probably couldn’t do the same.
For me, I grew up with an old globe that showed the USSR as a monolithic block, compared to the multicolored Western Europe. I was aware that part of Russia was considered to be in Europe, but thought the line was closer to Moscow until I was in high school. Digging up that old globe, I now see there is a blue line that marks the “continental divide”. Considering that the split ends at the Caspian Sea, young me just assumed it was a river!
Having traveled to Haiti when I in college, I realized it was presumptuous to indiscriminately refer to people of “color” African Americans.
The term really only properly refers to the descendants of those who were transported to the United States in the early history of our nation, and have inherited that history slavery and freedom. Other countries, particularly the Caribbean, experienced a totally different scenario. Haiti for instance declared its independence after generation of brutal exploitation and human trafficking, its population worked to death and completely replaced every twenty years.
In the case of Europe and Asia, it really is more of a cultural one, as the two are technically on the same landmass. One of the reasons “WWIII” was averted was the innate cultural understanding among all “Europeans”, including Western Russia; Russian culture was well known for centuries through trade, literature, and immigration. The languages and religions shared strong common origins.
There is some speculation that had Russia not been available to serve as middle ground between the developing communist China and the West, cultural differences could have made negotiations much more difficult, and could have contributed to a much “hotter” Cold War. Russian culture, part Asian, part European, was in a unique position to this encourage moderation.
If I say “man”, what do you see? We all have some sort of “basic mental blob” for any nouns. What I’m saying is that the Americans (those specific ones, I’m sure not every American would have the same mental blob etc etc) identified “african” with “black” so strongly that seeing a bunch of people who were as African as Kilimanjaro but whose features were mostly on the “Indian from India” type of look with a “Chinese” thrown in was an actual cultural shock for them. Only one member of the ZA team was instantly accepted by the Americans as African (she’s Zulu); I heard conversations like this one below several times, involving different Americans and different South Africans:
“So, what made you immigrate to South Africa?”
“Nothing, I was born in South Africa.”
“You were born in South Africa?”
“Yes, everybody in our team was born in South Africa.”
“Really?”
“Promise. Now can we go back to you explaining this ‘master data’ thing to me?”
“But, but… how were you born in South Africa?”
One of them eventually answered this last gem with “the usual way!”
Interesting - I had an (heh) US American mother with her young son on holiday here in the Caribbean. He asked me - for his school diary of his holiday - which continent we were on. I explained we were not on a continent, but an archipelago. The mother totally flipped. I was somehow stuffing her boys head with nonsense - we must be on a continent. Er … The West Indies???
I bet this argument has ever been made intellectually honest ONCE, it’s a pedantic bone to pick with someone because they dislike America or aspects of it. Americans are obviously, with a moment’s thought, not claiming the continent for ourselves, but simply calling ourselves the only shorthand for “Citizen of the United States of America” that is not hideously ugly.
They know that, but they’re just being a jerk.
edit: It is especially ironic for a COLOMBIAN of all people to say that considering the USA was called “Columbia” before Colombia became a nation
Absolutely, and well said. I’d like to add that I don’t know one person from Latin America that would say they are “American.” I have United States citinzenship and Peruvian nationality. Most of my family is in Lima, Panamá, Mexico and Bogotá. **Not one of them (or anyone they know) calls themselves “American.” **
What a lot of Americans (maybe other Westerners?) don’t understand is that “colored” in South Africa means the descendants of the Asian Indians that were brought there (by the British, I think, to harvest sugar cane?). One of my favorite things about South Africa is the excellent Indian food, without having to set foot in India again (gulp, I think I have to go to India next month).
Oh, since I’ve had the opportunities to go to South Africa, I’ve really fallen into love with the place. It comes as a close second to Mexico for future retirement options. Unfortunately both have severe political and safety issues that will have to be resolved before making a choice. Luckily (??) I’m not retiring tomorrow.
No, this isn’t quite right. The “Coloured” category in South Africa was for individuals of mixed heritage, which could be European and African heritage, or European and Asian. There was also a separate category of “Indian.”
