Well the point is that the name has always been some version of “Iran”. The 1930s change is somewhat like having Germany insist that they be known in English as Duetchland.
The point of what? We’re talking about people who are speaking in English, not in Persian.
I knew an Afghan from a Dari-speaking family who always told people she was “Persian.” It usually worked until she tried it with a group of people knew about these things, and then it got hairy, with accusations of lying and such.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, necessarily, for people to tell inconsequential falsehoods about their background to new acquaintances.
I pretended to be Irish when I met my first husband. Terrible fake accent included. He didn’t know any better and I didn’t tell him the truth for months. Our marriage lasted four months, the demise no doubt helped by lies like that. The odd thing is we found each other on FB 20 years later and I discovered he’s not really Mexican, but Native American. He’d lied because back then it was cooler to be a hot Latino. We were only 18, if that’s any excuse.
There are circumstances where I wouldn’t care in the least mentioned here. Someone being vague, not wanting to be stereotyped, or if due to my overpersonal questions they dissemble. I would feel wierd about it if they maintained the deception over a long time, or in the face of contrary evidence. It can be one of those things like height or age where people may be inaccurate, or it can be an attempt to decieve with bad intentions. The details of the situation matter here.
Wow. What a story.
Okay, all you people who think it wrong, tell me how you react to this specific situation. A colleague of mine, a German born Jew, left Germany in 1939 when he was 16 (he was 90 in December and still going strong). He and is family escaped to England where they were arrested as enemy aliens. His mother and sister were let go, but he and his father were sent to POW camps. My colleague, let me call him Jim, was sent to a POW camp in Canada. After a year or so they decided that Jews could get out if they could find someone to sponsor them. Which Jim did (a Jewish businessman in Montreal). So he got out and actually enrolled as a student at McGill (which has been associated with as student, instructor, professor, emeritus professor for more than 70 years!) But when asked where he was from, German was not a popular answer in the early 40s and he always said “Swedish”. Was that wrong?
At a party, he was told, “Oh there is a Swedish girl here, you must meet her.” So he gulped and met her, prepared to own up. It turned out she was also German born.
Your example is rather surprising as one of the “proper” terms Dari Afghanis is “Farsiwan” which means “Persian Speaker”. However, note that “Afghan Dari” is a contradiction in terms, a Dari cannot be Afghan, only Pashto/Pakhto speakers can be. Daria would be Afghani.
Finally, I don’t think we should avoid correct usage because certain foreigners cannot be bothered to learn it.
I prefer people tell the truth about their origins.
Don’t get me started on those jerkass Americans who pretend to be Canadian…
That’s not quite fair. Maybe he does act like an asshole, and prefers to throw Canadians under the bus.
The only time I can remember someone lying about his nationality was an Ethiopian guy I knew. We were on the subway and he told some Eritrean guys that he was Somali, presumably because he didn’t want to get into politics.
But… if they’re Iranian and answer Persian, it’s the truth.
I’m confused about why would anybody think that’s a lie.
I had a coworker who didn’t want people to know she was Romanian, because she thought that Romanians had a bad reputation; after all, on the same day she’d arrived, the police had nabbed a band of Romanian bank robbers. Once we got over our surprise, we explained that seriously, if we were going to stick the “everybody there is a bank robber / drug lord / pimp / whatever” on any nationality, any time Spanish police finds one of them doing wrong… we’d need a label the size of the world, and by the way the immense majority of the people Spanish cops grab happen to be Spaniards.
She confirmed it by asking another coworker point blank: “what you think of Romanians?” “Uhh… they’re the people from Romania? Round country, sort of NE of the Mediterranean? Romance language? Dunnow, what am I supposed to think of Romanians? I didn’t know I was supposed to have an opinion about Romanians!”
Note that she wasn’t planning on claiming a different nationality, but for some reason she was expecting to run into a prejudice which did not exist.
“Correct” in English and correct in other languages are not necessarily the same.
I always state I’m American, and then, while the questioner is drawing a deep breath and assuming a self-righteous air, I announce firmly that I will NOT be defending the country to foreigners in lengthy, pointless debates about every diplomatic action taken from 1776-now, sorry.
I had a friend in undergrad whose nationality “changed” after the start of the Islamic Revolution. From that point forward he was Turkish, and only those of us who knew him well knew that he was actually Iranian.
My Irish aunt who’s lived in South Africa for most of her life described herself as English to some South Africans - shocking 
Apparently it’s shorthand for ‘not Afrikaaner’.
I know loads of people who say they are Persian. People who say that here don’t say it because they expect people not to know, they say it because they consider themselves Persian, not Iranian. If tomorrow the US decided to become Naziland and you went abroad, would you be at fault for saying “I come from the United States of America”? You could just not consider yourself associated with Iran, or Naziland-formally-known-as-the-US. This is the case for everyone I know from the region who describe themselves as Persian.
Back to the OP. I sometimes find the “where are you from” question tiresome. I understand why people ask, fair enough. But it always goes the same way: “but if you had to choose, then where are you from” - “OK, but which football team do you support” - “OK, but if there were a war, which side would you be on”. Sometimes I just don’t feel like I “come from” somewhere in the sense other people do. I’m always a foreigner. So sometimes I just don’t really want to talk about it. If others lie to get around that awkwardness that’s totally fine by me. It would be a little much of we got married, maybe…but other than that 
So, we’re just a couple of white people?
It is a shock. I’ve heard people from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England say they’re British, but even the ones from England don’t claim to be English, they just leave it at Brit.
Yeah, but in that context it means “I’m white, live/have lived/am from South Africa, and my first language is English” - it does not mean “I’m from England”.
Two Hispanic students of mine and I once gave a huge laugh to another student when we noticed him hovering nearby and switched to English. He said “oh, you don’t have to do that!” We explained that yes, according to the Spanish-language version of Miss Manners, it would have been terribly polite of us not to switch, since staying in Spanish would have excluded him from a conversation which he was actually welcome to join. The laugh came when we said “I mean, from the way you were looking at us, we figured you were Anglo”: to him, African-American, Anglo meant “of British ancestry and very much white”, to us, Hispanic, it was a shortening of “anglophone”, “someone whose primary language is English”. When he was finally able to stop laughing he said “wait until my grandma hears about this, she marched with Rosa Parks!” It’s called polysemy.
Was he from Iranian Azerbaijan? In Persian, Azerbaijani language and people are called *torki (meaning ‘Turkish’), and I’m guessing he went by that as a loan-translation. Then you couldn’t really call him dishonest, because he didn’t make it up out of thin air, he merely gave it a literal translation.
*Azerbaijani is a Southwest Turkic language that is the closest relative of Ankara-Turkish, and the two share a high level of mutual intelligibility, even though they are quite distinct from each other.