US Week Numbers - USian Advice Needed

[Michael Pyne]

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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