Assuming you are correct, that the citizens of the USA say “America” because they are arrogant, as opposed to just using a term that they grew up with - what specific behaviors would you attribute to this arrogance so we can determine if this is accurate or not.
Other than using the term “America” - what behaviors could only be attributed to arrogance?
I think he’s making a joke. Particularly since most other countries refer to us as Americans as well.
To oversimplify why this is, the U.S. was the first established independent nation in the Americas. (We could have been called “Columbians” if some had gotten their way.)
And to clarify before someone gets pedantic on me, I’m referring to nations that exist in modern times.
No, sorry, not a joke, I don’t have enough time ATM, but I could easily bring forth many occasions where the USA has displayed its arrogance, for starters, interference with foreign countries.
To keep from derailing this thread, if you’d like to discuss this further, please feel free to start another. Send me a PM if you or someone else does, I’d be happy to discuss this :).
Wait, there’s a World Cup Championship in Red Rover? And we Americans are not the champions? We need to get on this right away. Contact your local elementary schools and tell them they need to step it up right now!
:smack: That’s not the point. The worst team in the NFL plays in the NFL. The champions of a national league cannot be “world champions” by definition.
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Unless that definition is just a practical, matter-of-fact one. There aren’t any football teams anywhere that would pretend that the NFL playoffs are not a de facto pitting against each other of all the American football (the sport, not the location) teams most qualified to compete for the title of world champion. Lots of teams are disqualified from consideration, but it’s literally impossible for them to have world-class American football players on them. If you want to compete at the highest international levels of gridiron football in the world we live in, you come to America and play in the NCAA and then the NFL. The fact that it wouldn’t necessarily be true if things were different and there was a super good Chinese Football League doesn’t mean it hasn’t been accurate in practice every time it’s come up.
Since there’s no possible set of circumstances that will result in our discovering a football team that could compete against the best NFL teams, what’s wrong with the tiny jump from best in the world to world champion?
Any country can attempt to qualify for the World Cup proper.
If, say, Equatorial Guinea wanted to compete in the World Cup Finals they could enter the African qualifying tournament. Vatican City could enter the European qualifying section if they so desired.
On the other hand, if Bhutan attempted to enter a team in the NFL their application would be unlikely to succeed.
Well there have only been 7 rugby world cups, so give them time.
In the last one, the finalist France almost beat NZ but almost lost to Japan, so it’s a lot closer than you think.
If they paid enough money, you might be surprised. Remember that this is a league with no team in the second largest city in the United States, but they do have a team in Jacksonville because somebody was willing to pay them enough to put it there.
The mechanics of “world champion” are pointless in the case of the NFL because the sport isn’t popular anywhere else, except Canada, where there is not one sane person who thinks Canada’s league is remotely comparable. While it is true the Super Bowl champion will not go on to play India or Japan or Brazil, it is equally true that the people in those countries aren’t interested in American football and don’t play it. So declaring the Super Bowl champions to be “World Champions” is in a sense true, but is very certainly a hollow victory, since the reason they’re World Champions is that the rest of the world doesn’t play the sport. There is no international American football championship because they have no one to play against. The Super Bowl is the highest thing there is.
By comparison, declaring the NBA champions to be World Champions is a bit lame because basketball actually is played pretty seriously in the rest of the world, and there are international championships in it. It’s not clear to me why the NBA Championship trumpos the Olympic gold medal or the worlds. The Mavericks probably are still the world’s best professional basketball team, but would be decidedly inferior to a few men’s national teams. Since there is a structure for determining international titles, “World Champion” is a misnomer.
I’m not aware of any such barrier to the NFL. As has already been mentioned, an NFL team in Toronto has been rumoured for years (Wikipedia). An interesting quote from that link:
I’d expect the driver here is money, of course, not a wish to redress perceived arrogance.
Actually, there is an international gridiron championship. It, not the Super Bowl, is the first thing Google turns up with search terms “american football world champions”. Sure, Super Bowl is much more famous, so I’m just saying.
They mean totally different things. The latter means “beat teams from all over the world”. The former means “would beat teams from all over the world”. I have no problem with that one.
There was a time (as late as the 1970s, IIRC) when the final series of the NBA Playoffs was called the “World Championship Series”. I think the NBA changed it to the “NBA Finals” because FIBA wanted participation from the NBA in its “club” tournaments, and FIBA has its own World Basketball Championship tournament (yes, it existed before NBA players were allowed to play in the Olympics, and, surprisingly enough, USA only won something like two of them in about 40 years, almost certainly because, unlike with the Olympics, NBA owners didn’t want college seniors playing in a “meaningless” tournament and risking their professional careers, so USA never sent any seniors to the world championships).
As for the NFL and Major League Baseball, both are tending to get away from the term “world champions” in an “official” usage, but announcers will still use the term, and it does appear in the occasional NFL Films Super Bowl show. In fact, weren’t the first two Super Bowls called the “NFL-AFL World Championship Game” when they were played?
I think the objection to the actual usage of “World Champions” is petty and small. There’s much better meat on the “We shocked the world!” bone. They all say it, nonstop, and it drives me up a wall. I remember after the Giants won the Superbowl and Strahan was giving his “We stomped you out” speech (heh) he was saying how the Giants shocked the world. No, Michael, the Giants did not shock the world. The world doesn’t give a flying fuck about American football.
On the arrogance meter, “World Champions” is maybe a 2 while “Shocked the world!” is around a 9.
My guess is that to the extent that they aren’t using them officially, it’s because they can’t have proprietary rights over the term “world champions,” but they have no problem with unofficial use because it improves the reputation of their product.
I find objections to American (and in some circumstances, Canadian) pro sports teams’ use of the term “World Champions” irrelevant, which is no surprise, because I think the same thing about the World Cup, the Tour de France, the Olympics, the Bundesliga, Sumo wresting etc. etc. etc. If non-Americans find that arrogant of me, I can live with that. 
OK, I may have misunderstood you. I take your point about the FA Cup. I think in general though, the team that wins the Premier League tends to be the best team in the country. They play 38 games against the 19 other top-flight teams. A team gets into the top-flight by winning successive promotions through the pyramid system. And, okay, over ten years the players who make up that team will come and go. But football clubs are about more than just eleven guys. You need a good infrastructure. Coaches, managers, support staff all tend to hang around for longer than players.
I know the question isn’t “what’s the best team in the country?” I’m not belittling Coventry City’s achievement in 1987 - the FA Cup has, and still has, huge prestige, and winning it is a big deal. But it’s a knockout competition. A lot depends on who you get drawn against. All you have to do is win seven / eight / nine games.
If it were possible for teams to play a game of football every day, you could put all the teams who compete in the FA Cup into a massive league and have them play each other twice, home and away, over the duration of a season. That would return a team that is definitely “champions of England”. This isn’t possible though. The Premier League is the best you’ve got.
The OP is no doubt similarly enraged at the coffee place down the street that claims they have the World’s Best Cinnamon Rolls. There has not been an impartially-judged Cinnamon Roll contest, therefore those people are arrogant lying bastards. And let’s not even discuss “Mattress World,” which is in fact only a piddling few hundred square feet, and not an entire planet covered with mattresses.
Similarly,** Ellis **is presumably annoyed when people say “the whole world knows” to describe things obviously not known to remote tribes in Africa.
But why stop there: people say “we’re worlds apart,” describe terrestrially-located things as “out of this world,” say they’re “on top of the world,” or say “all the time in the world.” People talk about “worlds of fun” or “a world of hurt,” despite not having actually changed the condition of the entire planet. It’s as if people use the word “world” as a colloquial idiomatic term used as a generic intensifier! Everyone knows that’s not allowed.
Really, though, the ultimate indication of American arrogance is that song they played when Washington defeated the British, “The World Turned Upside Down.” as if a stupid war changed the Earth’s polarity! Sheesh, if you’re going to be that arrogant, you might as well claim that your head of state is put in place by God almighty!
Not sure about Ellis and the OP, but your snide and inaccurate analogies are annoying, all right.