Why the U.S.A. Is Not "America"

Why the USA Is Not America, and Other Inconvenient Geography

Allow me, as a guest of nearly two decades, to point out something my hosts have misplaced: an entire hemisphere.

When someone in Mumbai asks me where I live, I say America. When someone in Gainesville asks where I’m from, they say, “Oh, so when did you come to America?” Everyone is satisfied.

Meanwhile, roughly 650 million people from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego clear their throats politely, because they too live in America, and nobody asked them.

Here is the inconvenient geography. The United States of America is a nation, fifty states, one anthem, one tax code of unspeakable length. America is a landmass, or rather two of them, North and South, stitched together at Panama like a pair of continents holding hands. A Brazilian is an American. A Canadian is an American. A Bolivian llama herder at fourteen thousand feet is more geographically American than a senator from Ohio is grammatically precise.

The name itself is a comedy of credit. In 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller was drawing a map and needed to label the enormous landmass that had recently surprised Europe. Columbus had stumbled onto it and insisted until his death that it was Asia, which is rather like arriving at your neighbor’s wedding and insisting it is your own. Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant with a flair for travel writing, had at least figured out it was a new continent.

So Waldseemüller, in a gesture of cartographic generosity, feminized Amerigo’s first name and wrote “America” across what is now Brazil. Not the United States. Brazil. The original America, the one that received the name first, speaks Portuguese.

So when we say “America” and mean only the United States, we are doing something linguistically remarkable: using a word coined for South America, derived from an Italian’s first name, applied by a German, to refer exclusively to a country that did not yet exist and would not for another 269 years.

The Sanskrit grammarians had a term for stretching a word beyond its sanctioned meaning: lakṣaṇā, secondary signification. They considered it permissible in poetry. They did not anticipate passport control.

In fairness, the United States has a defense, and it is a decent one. Every other nation in the hemisphere managed to fit its name onto a business card. Canada. Mexico. Peru. The United States of America is the only country whose official name is essentially a description, like calling your child “The Tallest of the Ghosh Boys.”

There is no graceful adjective. “United Statesian” sounds like a minor character in a dystopian novel. Spanish solved this long ago with estadounidense, a word that takes longer to say than the flight from Miami to Bogotá, and the Spanish speakers who use it would like everyone to know they are still a little annoyed.

Children here grow up reciting that there are seven continents, one of which is North America and another South America, and then go home and watch the news refer to “America” as the place between Canada and Mexico, and somehow both facts coexist peacefully in the young mind, the way children believe in both gravity and Santa Claus delivering to every rooftop in one night.

By adulthood the geography quietly retires and the shorthand wins. Ask an adult to name the largest country in America and watch the gears grind: is the answer Canada (largest in North America), Brazil (largest in South America), or “us, obviously”?

I do not write this to scold. A word means what its speakers agree it means, and I have agreed along with everyone else; I came to America in 2007 and I will not pretend I meant Paraguay. But it is worth knowing what we are doing when we say it. We are using a continent’s name as a country’s nickname, the way a family might call one child “the baby” long after she has children of her own. The other Americans notice. They always notice.

Perhaps that is the real lesson hiding in the joke. The United States did not inherit the name America; it borrowed it, from a hemisphere, from a mapmaker, from a Florentine who never set foot north of Venezuela. A borrowed name is not a possession. It is a responsibility, something to grow into rather than something to own. Which, now that I think of it, is not a bad description of citizenship either.