From Spain here, when we want to speak about USA people we use the term “yankee” or “gringo” rather than “american” cause our americans arent from USA, that terms are correct or mean other things?
Burros como o caralho is Portuguese for USAians.
It translates to something like dumb as fuck.
Idk what a 4 nation game is (at least if it doesn’t involve Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), but I always thought the land from (fake) London to Windsor, Ontario was very suspicious.
Unfortunately the USAians are so dominant in the region of the Americas that they’ve coopted the term American for most people. My Columbian friend hates when we refer to USAians as Americans because he says “hey we were here first” 😆. But unfortunately that’s the way it is.
Yanks or Yankee Doodles is what we used to call them but they get rather upset these days when you call them that. I wouldn’t call them gringos because it just sounds unnatural for a Brit to say that seriously.
In America, yankee means people from a particular part of America. But we use it here in Australia to mean any American. It’s especially fun when people from the south (that is…the south of the country America, not from the continent of South America) take offence at the term IMO.
We also use “seppo” which is an Australian shortening slang of “septic”, which is rhyming slang (of the kind used in both Australia and London, England) that comes via “septic tank” via “yank”.
Gringo seems strange to me. I thought that was a predominantly Latin American term for white people, and would apply equally well to Americans as Canadians as Australians as (of particular relevance to someone from Spain) English…but only the white of each, so it would seem to me it shouldn’t work as synonymous with “American” because it excludes African Americans, Asian Americans, etc. But I’m not Spanish or Latin American, so I might just be misunderstanding the word.
Edit: what yank means depending on where you are (allegedly):
Seppo is pretty common in the UK too, particularly in families with people in the forces.
Oh that’s really interesting. I would have sworn that o-shortening was a distinctly Australian thing. Do you have other words that you shorten like that? Do you know if that’s a specific term that Brits might have borrowed from Australia, or if it evolved naturally out of British slang?
Not sure where it came from but you can see it here under S - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_British_military_slang_and_expressions#S
As for other words, I don’t think we do quite so many as the Aussies but there are words like aggro, cheapo, wino, preggo used in every day speech.
Hispanic here, I grew up using “gringo” specifically for people from the U.S. despite skin tone.
Canadians are “Canadiense”, English are “Ingles” but United States? “Estadounidense”? It’s sort of like saying “United Statian” but arguably more “correct/proper”
Gringo is just much faster/easier to say.
That being said this can vary a little from one Latin-American country to another.
Not too sure about gringo but I know yankee is correct, I hear that one a lot from folks I know in the UK.
There’s some weird linguistic drift where in the southern US, we call northerners yankees, even though in the rest of the world we’re all yankees. Now I’m curious how that started.
That Southern US usage dates back to at least the US civil war in the 1860s.
But yankee was used to refer to at least some people in what is now the US as early as the 1660s.
I dunno how true it is, but I’ve heard it gets even more specific once you’re in the north. I shared a map in another comment detailing the different meanings of it.
As for the etymology, apparently it goes back to Dutch settlers of New Netherlands, and may be connected to the name Janneke. It seems to have gone from being used by English settlers to Dutch settlers to being used in precisely the reverse at some point, and has at times meant either someone of English descent, of early Protestant descent, or other things.
It was used more generally by outsiders to refer to Americans as far back as the Revolutionary War (the song Yankee Doodle Dandy was originally making fun of Americans—macaroni being a sophisticated style of dress), so its history being used in that way actually predates the Civil War associations that I think many Americans would give it today.
So yeah, it really does have a fascinating linguistic history.
Also, weird…this is the second time in as many days I’ve had cause to look up Yankee Doodle Dandy.
As a Dutchie, I’ve heard it being an contraction of the names Jan and Kees, both are common names in Dutch
