yakalskovich | LOLcatism with serious background

Americans are American.

Somebody did that in crackchat the other night. Somebody else linked to news items of 'Brits are still the same people as the ice age hunter-gatherers' and 'pre-Roman inhabitans of Britain might have been Germanic' -- I did rant about 'Celts are now Germanic argh argh argh'? --and I went 'I am a linguist here, what counts for me is what language people spoke'.

Somebody (I know who, but won't say as not to embroil her in unwanted debate) replied to my pronouncement with a quiet 'American'.

I felt like going 'YES THAT EXACTLY WHAT SHE SAID!!' but refrained, later pondering that it's true for me as well, whose family is undoubtedly German since 1640, with an undoubtedly Slavic name. We spoke German all the time, we lived in German speaking territories, we married generations of women with German maiden names...

And, yes, while the language is called 'English', there is shading that will clearly identify Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American, Australian, and Indian.

Its a roughshod definition, not much better than 'Europe is everything that was Christian at some stage in the Middle Ages and nowadays takes part in the Eurovision Song Contest', but I personally prefer it to great ponderings of 'race fail'. If you want to sort people by race, you can only fail, see South African apartheid...

In mostly unrelated news,

essayel and I just pondered that a World Problem Solving Comittee made up from random members of both our flists would have a much better chance at actually solving the current problems of the world than the people who are in charge of it now. **votes for 'Somebody' up there to be in charge of the race problem subcomittee**