The hostility with England has a big role in “American” sticking. It used to be a general term for any European colonist coming over to the Americas, but when British colonists started getting more and more pissed at the homeland, they started embracing that general term more and more.

This stuff always looks a little weird in a vacuum, but if you playback the tape and get familiar with the history, it makes a lot more sense.

It makes a lot more sense if you look back at what the colonies were called when the name was adopted. It’s really just a holdover from a naming solution that wasn’t very weird during the time that it was introduced. Language evolves in weird and funky ways.

It’s one of those things that made sense at the time, but looks a little weird if you don’t account for the history.

Folks living in the British colonies wanted to differentiate themselves from the English, so they called themselves “Americans” because they were in the “American colonies.”

The name stuck after the colonies became the United States.

Looking at the downvotes, remember upvoting an article ≠ an endorsement of the shitty technology being discussed in the article.

We shit on the technology in the comments, and upvote it so more of us can read about it and shit on it.