Re: OT Caution!! IRA funding (was: English word order and bumper stickers

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:43:50 -0400, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

>Admittedly a sensitive topic....
>
>Adrian wrote:
>
>>The word "America", in
>> this context, was almost universally taken by Americans to mean "the
>> American government", whereas it was almost universally taken by
>> non-Americans to mean "the American populace".
>>
>Well, as you see, I fall into the first category; I'm truly surprised at the
>second-- everything one hears, even from the Arab world nowadays, certainly
>suggests to me that non-Americans are quite capable of distinguishing the
>two, indeed eager to do so.
As far as my experience reaches (little parts of Switzerland), many if not
most won't distinguish between American government and American people, just
as they won't distinguish between Israeli government and Israeli people
etc., and even among educated people. The only reason why I dare to think
that I'm a little better than this is that I have close contact to people
who have suffered a lot from such indiscrimination: US-Americans and Germans.

Personally, I try not to use the words America(n) except for referring to
the continent as a whole, even though this is unusual.

It's strange how names of countries are formed. Sometimes, the place name
adopted for the country may have been used for the whole area of that
country (Australia), sometimes only for a part (England, Holland). However,
it seems very strange to me that the name of a continent has become the name
of a single country.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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