> It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit)

Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".

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ineedasername 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Probably because most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time when the EU was, comparative to today, insignificant in # of countries, population, GDP, and general importance, and so very little talked about in either news or text books compared to Europe as an economic and political block. And since Europe was abbreviated 'Eur' well, easy to see how dropping the 'r' hasn't resulted in universal US intuition that it's not the same thing. In general though it does seem pretty understandable to think something calling itself "The European Union" is comprised of just about all of Europe. Especially back with the expanded in '93 countries it was a little presumptuous at only a small fraction of the continent getting together and calling itself that? I do remember learning something about it in school at the time, under the EEC name.

Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off the tariffs, peace, etc.

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antonvs 3 days ago | parent [-]

That's a lot of justification for what ultimately just amounts to ignorance of the outside world.

It's certainly not the case that "most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time..." The EU exceeded $3 trillion in GDP by 1980. The original EU countries included Germany, France, and Italy, so were hardly insignificant.

	▲	ineedasername 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You don't seem aware that the "EU", in 1980, didn't exist, nor did you do the sums on the ages of the population in school by the time it did exist to realize that yes, by typical textbook replacement timelines in schools, something like the existence of the EU is unlikely to have been in the textbooks during the school days of most people over the age of 30.

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R_D_Olivaw 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hell, watch an American's face when you explain to them that "America" doesn't ONLY refer to the united states.

See the gears grind to a halt when they are reeducated on the concepts of "Central AMERICA" and "South AMERICA".

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nicole_express 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the United States, "North America" and "South America" are generally treated as separate continents, so therefore as a whole are called "the Americas". This frees up the singular "America" to refer to the US without too much risk of ambiguity. My understanding is that in some places, especially non-English speaking, is that North and South America are treated as a single continent called "America", which adds ambiguity.

People often get confused by divisions like this because they feel like they should be real in an objective sense, but continents are almost entirely social constructs. (There is a North American tectonic plate, and that's real, but it doesn't quite line up with the continent)

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rob74 3 days ago | parent [-]

Be that as it may, the thing that sounds odd (and a bit arrogant) to most "outsiders" is using the name of a whole continent for a single country and its citizens. I (from Europe) would definitely consider a Canadian, Mexican or Columbian citizen as an "American" too, not only a citizen of the United States. BTW, I'm really curious what Trump thinks the "America" in his "Gulf of America" stands for - the whole continent or only the US?

	▲	epolanski 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Okay, maybe arrogant, but still, it's the only country in the continent to contain the word America, no?
	▲	nicole_express 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Trump's definitely referring to the United States with his pointless renaming attempt because it's singular and not plural, but I'd be careful accusing him of thinking about anything. I doubt he does that very often. I guess the Organization of American States exists. But usually it's pretty unambiguous which sense is being used; like, I guess you could call Mark Carney an American head of government but it's basically just being obtuse, unless it was in the context of, say, a meeting of Carney with other heads of government in the hemisphere, and then it'd be unambiguous what was meant. Even "United States of America" is not unambiguous in the most pathological case; Mexico is also a country consisting of united states existing in the Americas.

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smolder 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

US education covers that much pretty well. Just not so much the geography of specific countries that belong to south america, europe, asia, and africa.

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ineedasername 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That would be the same grind to a halt you'd get on just about anyone's face when they have a random stranger try to explain something obvious in a rude and condescending way. The inside voice goes something like: "Do I walk by, is this person sane, or maybe say something equally condescending like 'Hey buddy, with the bombs we have it will be called whatever we want.'"