Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.
Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.
Now here is a hill I die on: most Central America is part of North America, except the eastern half of the territory controlled by Panama.
Still not as important as saying “European peninsula”.
This is what I was taught growing up, too. But personally I don’t actually care too much about where the borders between continents are drawn. I can see it being reasonable to put the northern border of central America anywhere from a line between San Diego and Houston in America to a line near the eastern edge of Oaxaca and Veracruz in Mexico. And the southern border anywhere from the western edge of Panama to a line between Golfo de Uraba and Punta Pina in northwestern Colombia.
Personally I’d call Europe a subcontinent, similar to how we talk about the Indian subcontinent.
At least from my part my issue is the conflation of topographical and cultural/political/economical terms, where the former gets shoehorned into the later. Except that the former is fairly stable, and the later changes as some weird hairless chimps go back and forth.
For example, if I were to define “Central America” as a subcontinent (i.e. a topographical division of another topographical term), I don’t think that putting the line between San Diego and Huston is sensible, because it’s simply too contiguous. A better boundary would be between Coatzacoalcos and Unión Hidalgo - it splits the territory controlled by Mexico into two, but that’s fine because it’s a political boundary.
Yeah, that’s more or less the southern limit of what I said could be sensible.