I think many people take the United States, or the idea of being from the United States, way too seriously. I think people in the United States (and the US government in particular) are particularly bad about this.
I also find it annoying that’s it’s difficult to concisely and non-awkwardly describe the United States by name. "America" is right out; America is just tad larger (nearly too continents in fact) than the US. "The states" is too vague and "the United States" or "the United States of America" is just too long (not to mention that other countries, like Mexico, are also "the United States"). "The USA" is hard to say and it pronounced differently in most Latin languages than in English.
USA is a perfectly pronounceable acronym and I think it’s crazy that we insist on reading the letters out. I think everyone should start pronouncing "USA" and calling the country "oosah" (with the u as in in food or Ubuntu). It’s citizens would be Usaites or Usians or something similar.
I think this would give the world a concise and unambiguous name for the United States and at the same time make it harder for people to take the country seriously.
funnily enough, I’ve been thinking the same myself. “USAnians” would be my favoured term, although pronounced “yoo-say-nee-ans”…
Yeah, but it sounds too much like “whoosaaa”, and people would just think you were starting to meditate or something.
In Esperanto, USA is Usono (oo-soh-noh), so you’re on the right track, I think.
Better than Unuiginta Reĝlando or whatever it is for the UK (most of us use our country (Anglujo) or island (Britio) names instead of the nation name anyway, though).
> “the states” is too vague
“the States” (with proper-noun-iness) isn’t, though, and I’ve used that when “the US” — or just the city/state I’m going to — isn’t appropriate.
– C.
This is nothing new to me, I say oosah all the time when refering to the USA. And friends do too. ;)
The German already pronounce it “die Oosah” although the French spell it “les U.S.A”. Then the German must be right, for many years now ;-)
A rose, by any other name, is still a rose…
America is perfectly valid. Everyone knows by context that if you refer to a country by the name america the place being mention is the United States. The reason is that Noone else refers to their country by that name. The United States is also valid for the same reason: even mexicans refer to Mexicon as Mexico not the “United States”. If, for example, we were to be that hard headed, we could not call Argentina by that name. There is silver in Bolivia too actually I think there was alot more. Bolivia would have to change its name: 1)There is atleast one other south american country that has Bolivar in its name, and Bolivia was not the only country freed by Simon Bolivar.
America is perfectly valid. Everyone knows by context that if you refer to a country by the name america the place being mention is the United States. The reason is that Noone else refers to their country by that name. The United States is also valid for the same reason: even mexicans refer to Mexicon as Mexico not the “United States”. If, for example, we were to be that hard headed, we could not call Argentina by that name. There is silver in Bolivia too actually I think there was alot more. Bolivia would have to change its name: 1)There is atleast one other south american country that has Bolivar in its name, and Bolivia was not the only country freed by Simon Bolivar.
America is a continet boys, Every one knows that. Since 1502 that the continent was called like that for the first time. America is the name of our continet in Standard geografy around the world where it it comprised of 5 continets represented in the five rings of the olimpic flag.