Stand-Up

Day 87 (279) – USians Unite

I want to start this post by first saying that I absolutely love this country and feel very fortunate to be able to live here in the United States… but we are some arrogant bastards.  (And I think bastards is correct, because I’d say Great Britain is our “mother” country, but we don’t really have a father country, unless you count every other country in the world).

You can’t deny that we “Americans” are arrogant.  For starters, we assume the word “American” to refer to citizens of the United States.  For those of you who weren’t aware, the “Americas” consists of 2 continents (North and South) and over 10 countries, yet we assume the term to refer to just us United States of Americans.  Though I can understand why – we don’t really have a good short-form name like the other countries in Greater America (Mexicans, Brazilians, Canada-sucksians).  Perhaps we could be USians?

Our arrogance doesn’t stop there either.  For example:

• Our various “world” championships that barely include other countries in this continent, let alone around the world (e.g. the World Series).
• “American English” – not only does this return to my first point above, but it speaks to the fact that we’ve taken “proper” English spoken around the world, and changed words for fun.  Can anyone please present a compelling argument as to why we changed “football” to “soccer” and then changed “football” to mean a sport that has very little to do with feet, and absolutely nothing to do with a ball (a football is not a ball, it’s a weird tetrahedron or something like that).  Included in this is our changes in spelling of English words for no reason (realize vs. realise – why?).
• The Anti-Metric System (who knows what it’s called, English or Imperial System?).  Screw the fact that 90% of the world thinks in meters, give us feet dammit!  Though, some might say it’s only a “meter” of time before we switch over…

And like I said at the beginning of this post, I love living in the United States.  I’m just saying maybe we USians (“yoo – ess – e – ans”, or “yoo – shuns” for short) can all do our part to reduce some of our arrogance.  (Seriously, football = kicking around a spherical ball dammit!)