"John Starrett" <jstarret@nmt.edu> wrote in message
news:400af257$1_4@corp.newsgroups.com...

Winston Smith, American Patriot wrote:

"Andrew" <prostetnic_vogon@hotmail.com> wrote in inimitable style:

roedy green isn't even an american. He's a left-wing Canadian.
And the Democrats seem compelled to suck up to the Canadians and the
French as well.

I thought Canada was in North America so its citizens would be
"Americans" as surely as the British and French are "Europeans", but
then I'm not a US citizen so my views probably don't count to morons
who post rubbish like that.

Canadians are Americans. As are Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Brazilians.
But Canadians and the rest understand the awkwardness of referring to

the

citizens of the United States as something like "United States-ites,"

and

so all those people are willing to give us a real pass since the name of
our country is more of a description than an appellation.

A good name might be "USAns", or "usans" (you-sans). Or perhaps
"USAians" or "usians" (you-see-ans). It's a matter of getting used to a
new idea.

<snip>

I like "Vespuccians". All the names involving US or USA sound sort of
clumsy.

--
John Starrett

We all know that America was named for Amerigo Vespucci. Amerigo by
Vespucci's day was an established if not especially common name whose
original meaning, it is safe to say, had long been forgotten. AV apparently
got it for no more profound reason than that it was his grandfather's name.

Since you asked, there are a couple of theories on the name's origin. One is
that it is a variant of Enrico, the Italian form of Henry, and derives from
the Old German Haimirich (in later German Emmerich, in English Americus),
from haimi, home, plus ric, power, ruler. Alternatively, it may come from
the old German Amalricus, from amal, work, plus ric. (Amalricus the foreman?
Beats me.) Amerigo shows up in Italian writing from around the 12th century
and may have been introduced by the Ostrogoths six centuries earlier (this
from Dictionary of First Names, Hanks and Hodges, 1990).

A more interesting question is why the cartographer Martin Waldseemueller in
1507 named the New World (actually, just South America) America rather than
Vespucciland--although I guess to ask the question is to answer it.
Amerigo's first name was a lot more euphonious than his last name, and (no
small matter) could be latinized into a word that started and ended with the
letter A, just like Asia and Africa before it. Also, unlike Christopher
Columbus, invariably referred to by his last name, Vespucci was one of those
people known in his own lifetime mostly by his first.

The most interesting question of all is why America was named after a guy
who was otherwise so obscure. For centuries it was argued that Amerigo
Vespucci was a fraud who had never traveled to the continent that bore his
name and did not deserve to have either of his names applied to anything.
But it is now fairly well established that he made at least two voyages to
the Americas, not as leader of an expedition but possibly as navigator, the
first time in 1499. He was not the first European of his era to set foot on
the mainland, as was once thought, but probably was the first to realize
that the land he helped explore was a separate continent and not merely the
coast of Asia, as Columbus and others believed.

Vespucci came to the world's attention chiefly through the publication in
1503 and 1504 of two brief letters he purportedly wrote to Lorenzo de Medici
about a voyage undertaken for the king of Portugal. Obviously the work of an
educated man (the Vespuccis were a prosperous family in Florence), the
letters managed to be both scholarly and entertaining, combining a sober
discussion of navigational issues with the news that the natives of the New
World would have sex with anybody, including Mom. Vespucci, or perhaps his
anonymous publisher, also had the wit to entitle the first letter Novus
Mundus, the New World, an audacious and as it turned out accurate claim.

The letters were by far the most interesting account of explorations in the
Americas that had appeared up to that time and caused a sensation that if
anything exceeded that created by Columbus's description of his first voyage
ten years earlier. The letters were reprinted in every European language and
soon came to the attention of Waldseemueller and his friends, who were
members of a think tank of sorts in the town of Saint-Die, Lorraine, now
part of France. The Waldseemueller group published Cosmographiae
Introduction (Introduction to Cosmography), the first attempt to update the
geography texts of the ancients. They were quite taken with Vespucci's idea
that the Americas were a new land, since it meant they had gone beyond the
knowledge of the ancients, in whose shadow they had long toiled. They
thought it only appropriate that AV's name grace the new land, of whose
extent they had at that point only the vaguest inkling. The naming of
America after Amerigo Vespucci was thus a bit capricious but not entirely
undeserved.