On Wednesday, May 04, 2011 17:07:38 Keith Rusler wrote: > Btw, we aren't called USians, but Americans ;).
To shed more light on this, there are two meanings to this I've encountered: 1. The rare one, but the one I'm sure John is using since it seems consistently used in at least Europe, is just the simple shortening of US citizens, e.g. the country is "U.S." so they're "U.S.-ians", which makes sense. 2. The common and provocative one, used to get a rise out of Americans, similar to the insult "Xian" to refer to Christians, "Jew coder" instead of "Jewish coder", etc. Usually the claimed reason is that the speaker gets really confused between the country (USA) and a continent (North America or South America), even though "North American" and "South American" are perfectly cromulent (and the standard) ways to refer to residents of the respective continents, much like European refers to residents of Europe. I think it's fairly obvious that John's using the first form and probably never even heard of that second interpretation, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. ;) Regards, - Michael Pyne
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