Posted by Mike Field on March 02, 2008 at 23:17:58 from 203.129.47.171 user mikefield.
In Reply to: Re: Victoria vs Victoria posted by John Lambert on March 01, 2008 at 21:18:13:
You're quite right, John. I've been having some off-board discussion with a good Southern friend about this, and I'll paraphrase some bits of that.
If Chileans (my former wife was one) or Argentinians or other people from American countries other than the USA wanted to refer to themselves as Americans, then I suppose they could. I think the point at issue though is not that they do want to, but that they object to citizens of the US abrogating the title “American” to themselves, when clearly they don’t have a lien on it.
I suppose if the United States of America had just one name to call itself by then there’d not be an issue -- if they all lived in Yoosa, then I suppose they’d be known as Yoosans....
I understand the difference between Yank and Yankee, and I used the words deliberately. They were not intended to be synonyms. I count both Northerners and Southerners in my list of Yoosan friends. I’ve always understood though that while the term Yankee can give rise to exception in the South, the use of the word Yank to describe a US citizen from the either side of the (modern interpretation of the) Mason-Dixon line is not normally considered offensive.
Mike