| zexen_lowe said: Hmmmm...ok, why not?. America is a continent, that we're taught in school was discovered in 1492 by Europe (and of course, the vikings predated that discovery). The continent was then named in honor of Americo Vespucio (don't know how you call him in English), and it's used to mean all the continent, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego. Since the continent is big and very diverse, it can be subdivided in subcontinents, you may say North and South America, here we say North (USA, Canada Mexico), Central America (from Guatemala till Panama, plus the Caribbean) and South America (Colombia down to Argentina). These are only subcontients, the bigger continent is still America, as you're taught in school. Thus, anyone born in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador or Haiti is as American as anyone born in the US |
Geologically (which is the only proper way to classify such things) North and South America are not the same continent. They both bear the name only because 15th and 16th century explorers didn't know about plate tectonics.
Personally, I just call those of us born in the US "Americans" because our country sucks balls at naming itself so we can't be "Brasilians," or "Canadians," or "Mexicans," or anything else interesting. Everybody always knows what we're talking about when we call ourselves (or people call us) "Americans" anyway so I've never seen what the big deal is all about.
Of course I don't have any problem with the term yankee either, though I'm pretty sure it predated the US Civil war. From wikipedia it seems the original usage was by the British to refer to anyone from their American colonies, and was later used by the South to refer to the North in the civil war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee
