Meanwhile, my father, a first generation Mexican immigrant and U.S. citizen, informed me (I guess I had never noticed) he has always replied "the U.S." when asked where he is from, because for Latin Americans, saying one is "American" is a vague identifier.

Beyond vagueness, "American" also can be interpreted as a loaded term when verbalized by people from the U.S. As one Argentine friend explained, "Someone from the U.S. calling him or herself 'American' is equivalent to people from the U.S. traveling anywhere in the world and expecting everyone to speak English." In other words, many link the practice to that negative U.S. tourist stereotype: rude, culturally unaware and self-centered.

For some ears it even evokes memories of U.S. imperialistic tendencies. "For Latinos/as here and abroad, calling this country "America" is offensive," wrote political activist Elizabeth 'Betita' Martínez in 2003. Martínez was writing at a time when anti-U.S. rhetoric from Latin America was particularly common. The movement was toward Leftist, Populist leaders, of whom the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was the poster child, always free-flowing with criticism of the U.S. and comparisons between President Bush and the devil. "We should all ask ourselves," Martínez wrote, "do we really want to approve that racist, imperialist worldview by using the empire's name for itself?"

Politics and political correctness aside, is there a factually correct or incorrect way to employ "America" and "American"? "I'm not sure if it's incorrect or correct," said Cynthia Arnson, Latin American Program director at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "I think it's an aesthetic issue. If you're in place where it is likely to be taken badly, it's better to refer to oneself as from the United States."

There's also the question of what "American" means to those in other countries or of other tongues. "In France, it's 'Americans' that's largely used (to refer to people from the USA)," Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart, editors of French newspaper Le Monde's language blog, wrote in an email. Rousseau and Houdart themselves, however, consider the term imprecise, which inspired them to write a post entitled Should U.S. Americans Instead Call Themselves 'United Statesians? ' They pointed out in the piece "'American' is a multi-layered word, of which the meaning varies depending on context, and which can illustrate a form of set theory: all Americans (of the U.S.) are American, and yet all Americans [i.e. of the continent] are not American (of the U.S.)!"

When it comes to potential substitutes to clarify the situation, the two noted that "People from Quebec and other francophone Canadians have used the term "Etats-Uniens" going back decades, "since well before the birth of the anti-globalist movement.'" (Meanwhile, anglophone Canadians, at least in my experience, seem to stay largely removed from the debate: Canadian friends have all said they "definitely" do not consider themselves "Americans" and reserve that term for people from the U.S.)