How in the world (pun intended) did Vespucci show that South America was a continent?" Did he explore enough. The accounts I see is he sailed from Guyana to 6 degrees south latitude which is about 1100 miles. That’s less than the north south stretch of Great Britain, which is not a continent.
Please quote the text of the Monroe doctrine that you think says that “America” has been used to name all the lands discovered by Columbus. I can’t find that.
I suspect the dispute arose recently due to our increasing usage of terms like “European,” “African” and “Asian”. They are wondering what to call people from the American continent(s)? Might I suggest Pan-American?
This is more funny than strictly true. But I like it.
Humans have a bad habit of not carefully naming things with due regard for complete logic, total backwards compatibility, and including a strong dollop of future proofing.
For disambiguation and maybe for “fairness” to the people we shared the continent with back then, we should have named the country the United States of <something other than America>. But they were too stupid to think of that then and now we’re stuck.
Think of it like some stuff left over from Windows 95 or Lotus 1-2-3 or the QWERTY keyboard. It made sense when invented but now we just have to work around it. Because of the huge installed base and the entrenched expectations of billions of naïve users are so strong we’re stuck carrying this forward. While admitting “Yup, it’s not real logical. But it made sense at the time. Just go with it.”
After the OP’s whiners “fix” this problem, perhaps they can turn to reforming Unicode as a way to ram Latin alphabet orthographic standardization on all the non-Latin scripts around the world. Now that’s an illogical swamp ripe for the draining. Yeah right.
IN Aus I’ve been called a ‘septic’. There must be many Australians who wouldn’t recoognise the term, but there are many recent migrants. (I here that Aus is currently the most multicutural/migrant country in the world)
Well, you’re totally wrong about that.
2013 report, but I can’t imagine much has changed dramatically.
Yes, it has. This is the first year Aus made the top of the list.
Oh. Cool. Where is the list?
Yes. That is certainly a case of Euro-centric chauvinism back when I was in school - I must give you that. Antarctica didn’t count, probably because it is mostly uninhabited, give or take a few scientists. I was also taught, that the five Olympic rings represent the five continents (which is also a myth).
All this never really made much sense. And as far as I know, current teaching uses seven continents.