The Trouble with Americans. Are we truly Americans? Should we be renamed?

The trouble with Americans

John Ryle
Monday September 7, 1998
guardian.co.uk

A reader in Ecuador takes me to task for my use of the word 'American'. Why, asks Lincoln Reyes, is it routine to use this word, without qualification, as a synonym for 'citizen of the United States' when the majority of Americans, properly speaking, are not from there, but from other countries in North, South or Central America? If you are a Latin American like him, he says, it is galling to be consistently written out of the geography of the continent that gave you birth. No wonder people regard the US as imperialist, when it appropriates the entire hemisphere for its own exclusive domain name. How do I think it feels to be Mexican, Chilean or Canadian, confronted every day with such linguistic chauvinism? What I think is that Mexicans and Canadians have got used to it. They've had to. It is not impossible to change the name of a country. (Where, we may ask, are the Zaires of yesteryear?) But renaming the most powerful country in the world is not on the agenda. When Osama bin Laden declares war on 'America', we know he does not include Ecuador or Mexico. The usage is worldwide and unlikely to change. This column, though, has never been one to turn its back on lost causes. So let us ask why it is that, in an age of political correctness, of sedulous public avoidance of terms that can cause offence to nations and ethnic groups, America has been exempted from reproach? The US is the home of political correctness. What Lincoln Reyes is suggesting is that it take a dose of its own medicine.

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Does the US have some proprietorial claim on the name of the continent it occupies? Some kind of historical precedence? Not at all. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian who almost certainly never set foot in North America. He did explore the coast of South America, however, and in the 16th century a German cartographer named the southern part of the continent after him; only later was the term extended to include the north. So the US calling itself 'America' is something like South Africa calling itself 'Africa', or the Federal Republic of Germany 'Europa'. Even the phrase 'United States' is not the preserve of the authors of the US Constitution: Brazil's official name is the United States of Brazil.

Luckily, since there's no other claimant for the name 'Brazil', it is seldom used. Even Lincoln Reyes would permit the USA to call itself the United States. But there is a problem when it comes to US citizens. United Statespersons? Usanians? Hardly. If we are to follow the Reyes Rule we will have to refer to them as 'people from' or 'citizens of' the US. Both take up a lot of breath. Since we talk about the US so much, we need short words and synonyms to avoid monotony. And synecdoche to avoid redundancy: 'Washington' is used to stand for the US government and 'America' stands for the country itself - the whole represents the part. But it seems there is no figure of speech that can produce a concise and acceptable term in English for its inhabitants.

There's a word in Spanish, estadounidense, but it is hard to get your tongue around. 'Gringo', of course, is the word most Spanish speakers use. But apart from its pejorative overtones, the word 'gringo' is not specific enough. Canadians are gringos; and you and I, if we are anglophone, are probably gringos too, whether we are white or black or brown.

Contrariwise, in some parts of South America 'gringo' is used for anyone, even a native, who is fair in colouring. What about 'yanqui'? It is also pejorative, of course. And the word means something different and more specific within the US. The use of 'yanqui' in South America is a reversal, in fact, of the rhetorical move that enshrines 'American' as a synonym for US citizen. Where people in the US, in calling themselves Americans, have taken the whole for the part; Spanish speakers, in borrowing 'yankee' for a New Englander, and extending it to the whole of the United States, have used the part for the whole. The negative connotation of 'yanqui' in Spanish reflects the distaste for US hegemony that my Ecuadorian correspondent exemplifies. 'Yankee', its equivalent in British English, has a weird, jocular air. We haven't used 'yank' for yonks. It belongs with 'Old Blighty' and 'Johnny Foreigner'. If political correctness does not proscribe such terms, good taste surely does.

Let us, then, register Lincoln Reyes's proposal. But someone from a country that calls itself Ecuador may not be in a very strong position to object to the appropriation of geography in the cause of national identity. There are other countries that lie on the Equator; any of them could claim the name for their own. I don't suppose people in Equatorial Guinea are too upset about Ecuador's bid for nominal rights over the noughth parallel, but if Lincoln Reyes is serious about curtailing US linguistic imperialism, he may have to look at changing the name of his own country as well.