Tuesday, November 26, 2013

This is America! Wait, what? [Infographic]




It is funny how many people are taught that "The Americas" is one continent.  Oh, and some people are bugged by the "arrogance" that Americans have for being the only people to call themselves "American" when there is a whole bunch of other countries here too.

3 comments:

Craig Lungren said...

In my opinion, I disagree with the bottom right picture. The Americas are 2 continents and can be merged into 1 whole continent which IS AMERICA.

The United States of America is a country but NOT America. It is either the United States, USA or U.S. America for the short version. If you look at Google Maps and zoom out, you will read between Canada and Mexico - the country is written as United States.

To me, it makes sense to say 50% of Americans are North Americans and the other 50% are South Americans. In fact, America was originally a continent that was named after an Italian Explorer named Amerigo Vespucci. USA can’t change history by using their own word term for America.

fcsuper said...

Craig, some regions teach it this way, but for your explanation to stand (which actually has little to do with the USA itself, per se), you'd have to redefine Europe, Asia and Africa as a signal continent. You'd also have to ignore that North American Continent is on a different continental plate as South American Continent. To even further that point, there is actually no way to travel by land on road or rail between between North America and South America. See Darién Gap. The two continents are practically disconnected from a human standpoint.

Also, this posting is meant to be a humorous response to another similar infographic about UK/England/Britain/etc, which specifically called out "Americans" (meaning people of the USA, not a general callout to peoples of The Americas) as not understanding European complexities.

ZETI said...

🥇1507 👉🏼AMERICA (North,
Central and South America)

🥈1776 👉🏼United States OF America.