I think we should also look at the fact that there are very few American animations that focus on anything that isn't comedy.  Japanese animation, on the other hand, has a lot you can find.  

You mean the word 'cartoon' which comes from the Italian 'cartone'?  Because if you do, then that's hilarious.

I don't know where you got this "because French is kewl" stuff from, either.  Anime is just the shortened form of animation--the Japanese love doing that--which they almost certainly borrowed from English, as early animation from the US was the biggest influence on early Japanese animation.  The root doesn't matter in this context.

As for the OP, technically speaking, anime is cartoons and cartoons are anime.  However, people in other parts of the world have adopted the word 'anime' in order to easily and quickly distinguish Japanese animation in conversation.  Otherwise people would have to say "cartoons from Japan" all the time, which would be stupid.

Personally, I don't care if people use the term cartoons for anime.  It's like using 'picture' when you're talking about the Mona Lisa, though--using 'painting' would be far more informative and require less extra defining.  It just makes sense to be as specific as you can.  That people seem to have a problem with other people using the word 'anime' for the sake of improved communication is really, really funny to me.

Yeah, that's why I said before in another thread that I think Titan A.E. was the last great American animation.

Didn't know that =D I guess I'll just call everything animation from now on lol.

yea, I know many comedy anime myself, but the spectrum of japanese and american works just seem different to me (ok, I'm not nearly as informed about american shows tbh)

while anime are like 40% action 35% comedy and 25% rest from my perspective cartoons are about 70% comedy, 25% action and 5% rest, so anime just offers a broader spectrum of shows (afaik Japan produced much more animated shows aswell)

another differentiator probably is story contiunity, so while maybe about 70% of the anime advance a story I feel that about 80% of the cartoons don't really care about that

You can't go wrong with 'animation'.  It's really the correct term and it's free of the context associated with either 'anime' or 'cartoons'.  Whatever the terms mean technically, they've both become linked with particular styles.

When I first got involved with anime, back when we used to trade VHS tapes online, the term most people used was 'Japanimation', which sucked to type out all the time.  Then the people who were actually acquiring and translating the raws from Japan began borrowing the same word the Japanese used, 'anime', and I was glad it caught on.  'Japanimation' sounds lame.

I think both the art style and the quality of the animations are worlds apart.

I've never heard Japanese use 'anime," they just say like "animation" with their Japanese accent that goes ani-may-shien lol. I do remember people using Japanimation though, that's the 90s' lol.

I've heard japanese use the word "anime" a lot. It's very common to abbreviate things in Japan by dropping syllables, like "pokèmon", which originally was named pocket monsters or "poketto monsta". Similarly while the official word is "animation" in normal conversations it usually is called "anime".

It's a semantics thing. They're all "cartoons," in the sense that they're all animation, and most anime are derived from "comic" books of a sort.

Cartoons were originally short and rather satirical, the origin being the British satire magazine "Punch" contemporary to Dickens and based off of an Italian word for preliminary sketches. Animated cartoons followed the same idea, and while cartoon has been applied to the entire genre of animation, i still think that it would best be applied to theatrical shorts, or to half-length or third length (the 11 minute or 7 minute episodes that are put in pairs or trios to fill the half-hour programming slots on Cartoon Network and other channels), regardless of genre (from actual satire like MAD to screwball comedy like Spongebob Squarepants to some hybrid fantasy-comedy like Adventure Time), while full-length animated shows are just that, animated shows fitting in a genre.

Anime, then, falls under animation, and is usually in TV full-length format which would not merit the title of "cartoon," although it certainly is animation of just as much merit. Anime is just a shortened version of "Animeito" which, in turn, is just a Japan-ization of the word "Animate"