Nominal Domain : It Is Linguistically Impossible to Call American Citizens ‘United Statesians’

WHY DO WE call ourselves Americans?

How does it happen that we who inhabit only one of the many independent republics in the two Americas have arrogated that name to ourselves? Are not Colombians Americans as well? Brazilians? Paraguayans?

“Some Latin American students in an English conversation class I voluntarily teach for the International Student Center of UCLA,” writes Albert H. Clodius, “have repeatedly asked me what justification there can be for using the term American to refer exclusively to persons in the United States.

“Since then,” he goes on, “I have felt very uneasy about that usage. It is not only I, but many--perhaps most--writers and distinguished academicians I could cite who have misused the term in a way that some Americans of countries other than our own find offensively arrogant, whether we intend that impression or not.”

Perhaps the easiest answer is that we have always called ourselves Americans. I find little to justify our use of the word except usage itself.

When we were merely colonies of the Crown, the British called us Americans. They also used that word for American Indians, as well as for European immigrants and the natives of South and Central America; that hardly gives us exclusive right to it. But all the other republics of the two Americas found names that could easily be converted into nouns of nationality for their people. Chileans. Uruguayans. Bolivians. Guatemalans.

But our founding fathers did not call this country America. They called it the United States of America.

It is obviously linguistically impossible to call a people “United Statesians.”

I do not know when the term United States of America first took seed in the Colonial consciousness. In July of 1774, Thomas Jefferson referred to the “rights of British America.” A declaration adopted by the Continental Congress in July, 1775, used the term “United Colonies of North America.” It is curious to note, though, that the Declaration of Independence begins “In Congress, July 4, 1776, The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” The small u suggests to me that the colonists had not yet conceived of a United States of America as a sovereign state. In its last paragraph it refers both to “the united States of America,” and to “the United Colonies.”

In the Articles of Confederation of Nov. 15, 1777, we find “the United States in Congress assembled.” The die was cast.

The Preamble to the Constitution (1787) says unequivocally: “We the people of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

But a history of that work reveals that Gouverneur Morris changed the first draft from “We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts,” and so on, to “We the People of the United States.”

Grammarians, curiously, seem to shrug the question off. Roy H. Copperud, in his “American Usage and Style,” observes that “despite occasional complaints, the application of the term primarily to the U.S. and its inhabitants is so well established and so well understood as to be beyond reasonable criticism . . . . Unfortunately, there is no other expression to describe inhabitants of the U.S. . . .”

Bergen and Cornelia Evans, in their “Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage,” simply shrugs: “If it’s any consolation to those who resent it ( America ), the usage is founded on a lazy disinclination to pronounce the longer name rather than arrogance and it has no official sanction . . . . Nothing can be done about it, and it’s silly to complain.”

The sainted H. W. Fowler, in his classic Modern English Usage, is similarly unperturbed: “The use of America for the United States and American for citizen of the United States is open to as much and as little objection as that of England and Englishman for Great Britain ( and Northern Ireland ), British and Britain . It will continue to be protested against by purists and patriots and will doubtless survive the protests.”

We wouldn’t have this problem if they hadn’t named the New World after Amerigo Vespucci.