Who Are WE RV'ers Really?
It has occurred to me that much of the contentious discussion on this site that so infuriates the moderators and others is due in part to the varied ideas we have about just who is an "RVer" and the d...
Forum Discussion
fulltimedaniel wrote:
The link is just a song. A rather jingoistic one at that. And is not the final word on anything.
The fact is the land mass of North, Central and South America are known as The Americas.
This makes ALL of us Americans the same that living in the land mass of Asia makes folks Asians.
Or Africans
Or Europeans
Now within that designation we are Citizens of Canada (Canadians) Chileans Brazilians and so on. Here in the United States we co-opted this term to describe ourselves as Americans.
So to say that the TERM AMERICAN is owned solely by those residing in The United States is incorrect...just as incorrect as it is for the Canadians to disavow it. Many folks south of us refer to themselves as Americans.
But in every day usage it has become normal for most of the world to ...wait...dare I say it?...LABEL us as Americans. But that colloquial usage does not mean that it is wholly correct or incorrect.
I don't think that we co-opted it so much as it just evolved. The name of the country made it fairly difficult to come up with anything else. It's easy to say Canadian for Canada and Mexican for Mexico, etc., but United Statesian is a bit clumsy. Nothing else really works except American. We are all North Americans, only in the US are we typically "Americans" in casual conversation.
Not saying that it's right or wrong, it just is.
