Why are liberals forwarding memes about America being the name of a continent and the US being a country.

It’s nothing important. Just a time waster by bored people.

Haven’t seen that meme at all. I’ve heard people over the years mention that America and Americans doesn’t only apply to the United States but nothing particularly recent or attached to one political stripe.

Seems silly, but I have always seen it this way, for what it’s worth.

After all, we are the United States of America. If all fifty states were magically transported to Africa, we’d be the United States of Africa.

The United States is the name of our country, (North) America is the continent we sit upon.

Of course, as slang or shorthand, we refer to the US as ‘America’ (or ‘Merica’ if yo nasty) just a North and South America are collectively referred to as ‘The America’s’.

I’m on FB a lot and have not seen that meme.

Also, it could seem as though it’s a thing ‘these memes going around’, but don’t forget that every Facebook user gets served their own personal, tailor made, algorithmned page.
Hence none of the respondents so far have seen said memes.
Plus, it’s North America, and the United States of America.

Seems like much ado about nothing. I see this come up every now and then like it’s something of great concern, but I don’t really care. I have no problem referring to the U.S. as “America”. It is the only country with “America” in its name. The continents and regions are usually referred to as the Americas, North America, South America, Central America, Latin America…“America” by itself almost always refers to the U.S. Shouldn’t be a big deal.

I haven’t seen it on my Facebook, but I have deleted most political idiots from my feed and mostly see puppies and babies.

BadaBOOM! @Dutchess_III got it in one.

I’ve seen two separate memes about it. one was a few weeks ago, and now another today. I have not seen it a lot, just a few times I wonder if it is getting removed, or just not travelling across social media a lot. All these memes I am suspicious of, and recently I was on a zoom from DC where they were specifically talking about foreign governments and terrorists using social media to take problems that already exist in America and exploit it to divide us more. They mentioned racism, religion, freedoms, and some others.

@cookieman Actually, no, we are not just the United States. We are officially the United States of America. If our country had to move to another continent I’m pretty sure we would still call ourselves the United States of America with our constitution and laws.

Mexico is officially the United Mexican States, and we call it Mexico. On one of the threads I pointed this out to someone who felt very strongly we should not be using the term America for the USA, and she admitted she had no idea that was the official name of Mexico, and she lives very close to the Mexican border. She said she has a lot of Mexicans friends and none of them have ever mentioned it. Why would they? It’s not something that usually comes up People getting in a snit and they are ignorant themselves. Most people don’t seem to be very emotional about it though.

I think mostly it is much to do about nothing. I think it is good to be aware that some people might refer to people in other countries on the continent as Americans also, but I just don’t understand why that meme is being passed around. It might be nothing. It seems to be trying to take Americans down a notch.

I usually write US or USA, rather than America, but if others in the conversation use America, then I follow along.

@Caravanfan I pretty much agree with you. @Dutchess_III has a really good answer.

@Demosthenes Agreeing with you. I usually use The Americas to refer to the whole continent, or sometimes I say The continent of America. The USA does not even call the continent America, we use the seven continent model and break it in two as I mentioned above, which makes me think the meme was created outside of the US.

I just became the queen/dictator of my own country in another question, so this meme no longer alarms me.

We are however, mildly amused…

And why are you pinning this on liberals? How is this even worthy of a political statement? It’s a nothing issue.

@Dutchess_III Just because my most liberal friends are the ones sharing it and then get very defensive if someone says the photos are trying to make the US look small or something along those lines. It is probably nothing, actually it is nothing, but I’m just curious where it started and why they are forwarding it.

Ask them.

Seems like making a mountain out of a molehill to me.

To the extent that it reminds people of the commonality between all humans (as in, everyone living in the Americas are “American” in one usage of the word), I think it may offer a bit of good, but I doubt whatever memes you saw offer that sort of utility.

There are several different meanings for “American” and “America”; only one is “of the USA” or “the USA.” (According to Merriam Webster, the USA-meanings are less common than the other two.)

@sadiesayit That was another point I made on the thread that I had forgotten until you mentioned it. I think it is trying to say Nicaraguans and Brazilians are Americans too and it is a comment on what is happening at the border. Like we are all one people. I think different people are attracted to forwarding the memes about it for different reasons.

@janbb I didn’t intend it to be a mountain, just a question. I think I am fairly conspiracy theory about social media at this point, I freely admit that. I was reinforced when I was seeing so many memes and KNEW it was QAnon and alt-right messaging and people were clueless when it was so obvious to me. I wound up to be correct about a lot of it. Being right is not necessarily a good thing, I would much rather be wrong about these things. The reason I asked was to know WHY people were forwarding it. More curiosity than anything.

We can’t possibly answer that @JLeslie. We aren’t the ones forwarding them. You need to ask the people who are why they’re doing it.

Nit picking.

It’s useless literalism. Everywhere on Earth, people understand America to be the USA and its people are Americans.

Pretending otherwise is obtuse dumbassery.

This reminds me of the UK/England thing I learned in college. But even that I just thought of it as some useful geography lesson, not something so political, even when there was a hint of politics in the lesson. As a foreigner, I don’t care so much about that stuff. I already have enough on my plate.

You beat me to it Mimi. I was about to make the same remark. But you pretty much covered all the bases. Nothing more I can add.

@Nomore_lockout Fun fact: I notice that when people in the West talk about Asia, they seem to think of China, or maybe Japan. If you know anything about Vietnamese history, you’ll know that no Vietnamese wants to be associated with China, ever. But I’m well aware that Vietnamese history isn’t well-known around the world, and not many people know about the conflict with China.

If anyone finds the US/America thing offensive, then I’d like to see what comes to their mind when I say Asia, or even East Asia. I’d like to see if their mental image is something like a short yellow guy with small eyes speaking horrible English and making Kung-fu moves.

@Mimishu1995 Most people in the US were using Asian to mean people from East Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia. More specifically people who look what we used to call Oriental, but that’s now considered offensive in the US.

In the US people do refer to the Vietnamese people as Asian.

Now that we have Kamala Harris as VP, suddenly we seem to be referring to the entire continent of Asia, which is what I had been doing until I learned about fifteen years ago that most people here don’t typically mean the entire continent. Recently, one of our congresswomen became upset that Kamala was being used to supposedly also represent Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the central government, but she was not accepting that. She wanted someone who looked like they were from the Orient or Far East. Both of those terms seem to be outdated now.

@Mimishu1995 I hate to admit it, but you aren’t far off of the mark with some of us. Not all, but some. There are truly some ignorant ass people in the U.S.

@Nomore I was just taking a jab at those people who seriously make the meme political instead of seeing it as a fun geography fact ;) I just wonder how open-minded and tolerant they really are if they take the effort to get on the high horse and tell people what to think.

To be honest though, we have a lot of hypocrites in Vietnam too. They ger butthurt whenever Vietnam gets lumped with other countries, but don’t hesitate to spread ridiculous stereotypes about other countries. The world doesn’t need that BS.

@Mimishu1995 Would you refer to everyone who lives on the American continent as Americans? Would you call Canadians Americans?

I’m friends with many liberal activists and I have not seen this.

@JLeslie I call them based on where they come from, unless they specify otherwise. I call a person from Canada a Canadian, and a person from the US an American. Same goes for Mexico and other countries. So yeah, you can say that I use “American” to refer to people from the US, not the entire American continent.

I think people here do the same too. But then again people here don’t have that much knowledge of the American continent and they are the most familiar with the US, so there’s that.

@Jonsblonde Ditto that. New one on me as well.

It has always rubbed me the wrong way that people refer to the USA as “America”. I never have done that. I always say “United States” or “USA”. The United States does not own the term “America”. The USA is just part of North America and then there are the many countries in South America. People living in the USA, or any other country located in North or South America can correctly called “Americans”.

^^ And he is not a liberal.

I agree with @gondwanalon and I am a liberal.

I was contesting the OP’s politicization of the issue.

I think if people have their FB settings set to where certain types of posts are blocked, namely political posts, they may tend not to see things that others see.

@janbb: Exactly.

@Mimishu1995 That’s how most people use the term “American” in the U.S. as well. Every country has a demonym, an adjective referring to inhabitants of the country. The demonym for the U.S. is “American” and the only country with that demonym (no one says “United Statesian”. Cf. “British” as a demonym for the U.K. when not referring more specifically to one of the U.K.‘s constituent countries). “America” is an informal nickname for the U.S., but a valid one.

Some Spanish Speaking countries in Latin America use estadounidense, which is United Statsian. My husband is Mexican and I hear them use Gringo more than anything, but of course that is slang. Latin America is less likely to use Americana or Americano for obvious reasons, but they do use the terms.

Some parts of Europe people use the word Yank or Yankee, especially the Brits, when referring to us, but inside the US Yankee means people from the north as opposed to all people in the country.

I notice that when people in the West talk about Asia, they seem to think of China, or maybe Japan.

I think most Americans would think of East Asia and Southeast Asia. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, Mongolia, etc.

When I worked with a lot of Indians, I learned to call the subcontinent South Asia. But I think (not sure) that most Americans do not use that term.

How about a link to them or one of them?

What does he need a link for?

I think @SnipSnip might be asking the OP.

ok.

I googled to try to find them online, because I don’t think you could see it on Facebook because of my friends privacy settings. I found one of them on this website. If you scroll to the middle of the page you will see the full picture with the blue background. This website also talks about the meme itself. https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/this-is-america-and-the-ambiguity-of-memes/

This is ridiculous.