proud to be misnomerian
I'm proud to be an American.I won't try to defend that pride: it's based mostly on things I had no responsibility for and no control over, which puts the pride in the same camp as many other collectivist emotions, but I can't pretend I don't feel it just because I think it's irrational.
One of the things I'm proud about is that "American" is a contested word -- contested by another entire continent (not to mention 2 other nation-states on my own continent). There's something very fitting to me about the label being so over- and underdefined.
No one calls me a United Statesian, even though that would be a more accurate description of my official statist citizenship.
Another thing I'm proud of about the American label is that it comes from the phenomenal PR genius Amerigo Vespucci -- not because he discovered anything, but because his maps and stories promoted curiosity and fantasy about this New World back in the Old World. (And I'm proud to descend from the cultural and economic history of that Old World.)
We United Statesians somehow managed to get primary claim to the term "American" even though Amerigo's maps were of SOUTH America. The nerve of us.
Meanwhile, the people of the extended gene pool of those the Pilgrims feasted with are called Indians (unless you're politically correct enough to call them "Native Americans," which would make you a sequacious numskull, since the term literally means anyone born in America -- wherever that is (as you know, my own favorite term is Amerindividual, but that's not very helpful, since I'm a native-born Amerindividual myself)). They're called Indians because Columbus thought he found them in India. To distinguish them from the real Indians in real India, they came to be called American Indians, which still begs the where-is-America question.
Lest we let the Europeans get too smug about this absurd tangle of longstanding misnomers, let me point out that France and England are both named for German tribes (which isn't so much a misnomer as it is a little confusing), Scotland literally means "The Land of the Irish," (and Ireland does not mean the Land of Ire -- though it sure sounds like it does), and finally, the name "Spain" comes from the Phoenician word I-Shaphan, meaning "The Island of Hyraxes." Is Spain an island? No. What's a Hyrax, you might ask? Wikipedia tells us that they are any of 4 species of small, thickset, herbivorous mammals living in Africa or the Middle East -- but not in Spain. That's like naming my part of the world "the satellite of penguins."
I'd love to hear more examples of misnomerian nationalities.
3 Comments:
Thanks for bringing this up. To me, "American" over "United Statesian" is a libertarian issue. I gag at "United Statesian" because it reduces group identity (which is dangerous, sure, but not inherently evil, and is very real as a social fact) to citizenship in a state. In those instances where "American" seems controversial and I'm not itching for a fight, I will answer to "North American" (not very specific, though), "Mid-North American" (much too wordy), or "Anglo-American" (I see no reason outside of politics to distinguish Americans from Anglophone Canadians. However, this term might raise the ire of Irish-Americans, etc. Also, I feel like I have a bit more in common with Quebecois than with Mexicans, and the former are definitely not "Anglo-American").
At one point, during an argument with a proponent of the term "United Statesian", I sarcastically coined the word "Sitaria" to refer to this country (and "Sitarian" for its inhabitants), from the Greek word for wheat. Although it was originally intended to be a satirical remark, I was nevertheless quite taken with the term, and would be proud to say, "I'm proud to be a Sitarian", if anybody would know what the hell I was talking about.
I don't see how "American" is any better in describing a US denizen than "Native American" is in describing a so-called American Indian.
I think the problematic part of the phrase "Native American" is not the "American" but the "native". It does violence to the usual sense of the word "native" by excluding most people born in the New World. Note that m-w.com gives "belonging to a particular place by birth (native to Wisconsin)" as the second definition of "native", but "living or growing naturally in a particular region : indigenous" doesn't appear until definition 6b. I don't think that "native" in the sense of "indigenous" is strictly wrong, but it should be deprecated when there is an alternative.
Naturally, the "American" used in "American Indian" or "Native American" is not the more common modern meaning, but the older sense of the word, as in "Columbus discovered America".
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