So this is somewhat interesting, I find.
I have a friend from Mexico among the 60-some-odd students from other countries that I know. There was a Begrüßungsparty (welcome party) last night for all of the exchange students (because we're finally all here), and we were both talking with some students from Germany and Slovakia. At some time, we hit the topic of America and being American.
The thing is, he claims to be American, too. I said, "Oskar, what are you talking about?" He basically says, "Hey, we consider that America [the Americas]. You, you are from the United States."
Ahhh... This is enlightening to me, even if only in a very small way. I also got that slight nagging feeling of an Ignorant American moment. Or rather, Ignorant "American." (Have I ever mentioned my vexation at the fact that most of the US population believes that they are the only ones on the planet, or at least that they're the only modern civilization and the rest of the planet is still crawling around on their knuckles and eating bugs from rotting logs...)
I'm not quite sure if that's just his mentality, or if it's just Mexico (we should ask some Canadians...), or even if he was just flat out joking with me (which I highly doubt). But there's that as a point of interest.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
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4 comments:
Ha. I remember being told that when I was in Mexico. Luckily, Spanish has a word for being "United State-ian": "estadosunidense." The problem is that there's no good English world for that, which is, I think, a lot of the reason people from the U.S. claim to be "Americans" and hope everyone knows what they are talking about.
Yes. It definitely makes me wish we had a single word for us as well. You know for what I've wished that we had a single word for for a long time now? American English. We just don't speak "ENGLISH." It's not English. It's... Americanese or something. Now, if I tell that to Americans, they'd understand well enough. But it doesn't really work to try and use that on the international scale yet, as far as my experience.
I love this post. Seeing as how I am in Spain, we're all "estadounidenses" and never "americanos." It's something I learned awhile ago in my Spanish classes in high school, or maybe even middle school and I thought it was odd as well. It's true that American English just isn't up to the task of defining things well sometimes. We really do need to add in some words and have a name for our "dialect" of English. My roommate's younger sister (7 years old) and mother are living here in Spain for a few months and her sister is attending Spanish school. She had an English class and got nearly everything wrong on her homework assignment. Of course, she did not understand why because she's "American" and speaks perfect "Americanese" but here they teach British English. I picked up a copy of a language book in the bookstore that teaches people English. It was entertaining.
I'm not sure if Canadians consider themselves to be Americans, but I know that the attitude of the Mexican friend is far from unique. I don't know to what extent South Americans consider themselves American, but they certainly consider themselves to be a part of the "Americas" (of which they would include North and South America).
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