Yeah, I mean I totally get the annoyance of American being overloaded for both US person and of the American continents, but USAian ain’t the solution lol that kind of sucks (hard to say, no history to it, etc)
American is pretty unambiguous. What are you getting it mixed up with? No one else uses it. If you hear American, do you have to run through a list of other countries asking them which they are from? Of not, it’s unambiguous.
You could argue that it shouldn’t be the pronoun for a US citizen, but that’s a different argument than it being ambiguous.
The point you’re trying to make is correct on a technical level, not a functional one. Unfortunately we can’t will languages into behaving in ways we think is ideal simply by making pointless assertions in obscure forums.
I never said it does. I just said it’s the correct word. It’s not confusing or ambiguous. Only one country uses it. It also does represent multiple states in the americas, hence the name.
And I guess South African should be something else, because there are other states in southern Africa? Language doesn’t really care about being “correct” with terms. It cares about being understandable. No one knows what USAian is. Everyone knows what American is. There isn’t really any debate anywhere around what to call people from the United States of America, even among other American nations.
Funny that, I didn’t have to explain to anyone what it is because the immediate reaction by people like you was "that’s not how you say ‘American’ ".
You could have called them anything and I would have known what you were talking about because of the context. The same context you used to guess “USAian” was available to everyone else.
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The correct term for that is American by the way, not USAian.
Yeah, I mean I totally get the annoyance of American being overloaded for both US person and of the American continents, but USAian ain’t the solution lol that kind of sucks (hard to say, no history to it, etc)
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American is pretty unambiguous. What are you getting it mixed up with? No one else uses it. If you hear American, do you have to run through a list of other countries asking them which they are from? Of not, it’s unambiguous.
You could argue that it shouldn’t be the pronoun for a US citizen, but that’s a different argument than it being ambiguous.
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Chile citizens are called Chileans.
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The point you’re trying to make is correct on a technical level, not a functional one. Unfortunately we can’t will languages into behaving in ways we think is ideal simply by making pointless assertions in obscure forums.
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I never said it does. I just said it’s the correct word. It’s not confusing or ambiguous. Only one country uses it. It also does represent multiple states in the americas, hence the name.
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And I guess South African should be something else, because there are other states in southern Africa? Language doesn’t really care about being “correct” with terms. It cares about being understandable. No one knows what USAian is. Everyone knows what American is. There isn’t really any debate anywhere around what to call people from the United States of America, even among other American nations.
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You could have called them anything and I would have known what you were talking about because of the context. The same context you used to guess “USAian” was available to everyone else.
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