Around ~2008 I was in a Barcelona hostel and met a guy there. He started speaking and I interrupted him excitedly…“Oh you’re American!!”.
He looked down…the weight of pain curdled the air around us. You could sense deep sorrow welling beneath the surface of this man. He paused for what felt like an eternity to compose himself,
He looked up with a piercing, but harrowing, stare and said “No, I’m Canadian…”
I’ll never forget that moment. That sheer depth of emotion is something I haven’t experienced before or since.
Did I silently murder this poor Canadian soul? How do Canadians cope with the mistaken identity?
Isn’t everyone in our hemisphere American?
If you went with that convention, you’d have to call us “United Statesians” and people seem to hate that. That’s how we wangled the adjective form from the rest of the Western hemisphere.
Nope. Too close to Asians. We’ll have to go with cowboy wannabes.