One of the silliest damn arguments I've ever heard is the one that says that those evil Yankees arrogantly arrogate the names "America" and "Americans" all to themselves with no concern for the outraged feelings of their southern neighbors. What bollocks.

First, the United States is an independent country and can freely call itself "Bubba" or "Junior" if it wants to. Or maybe "Lemmiwinks." Personally, I'd like to change our name to "The United States of Chuck Norris." What business is this of anyone else's? We don't tell Spain it ought to change its name to "East Iberia" or "Baja Andorra" or whatever. In fact, what seems arrogant to me is the insistence of some Spanish speakers that the US should change its name and that Americans should change the way they refer to themselves when they speak their own language, English. I certainly hope you would consider me arrogant if I dared demand that you change the way you speak your native language. As far as any English-speaker is concerned, in Spanish you can call us "estadounidenses" or "norteamericanos" or "yanquis" or whatever you want; it's none of our business.

Second, it wasn't the Americans who began calling themselves "Americans," but the British. That is, the British decided they needed to distinguish between Britishers from the metropolis and those nasty colonists, and so started derogatorily referring to the colonials as Americans. We just carried on the tradition, and all English-speaking people do the same thing.

Third, the Spanish-language concept of "América," extending from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, doesn't exist in English. We call it "The Americas" (cf. the official name of Sixth Avenue in New York City), "the Western Hemisphere," or "The New World." Our North America extends down to Panama, while the Spanish América del Norte goes only as far as the Mexican border. Everything south of the Mexican border is Latin America in English. That just happens to be the way people speak the language.

Another thing I've noticed is that in normal politically correct usage in Spain, "América" really means what we call Latin America, and the United States and Canada are "Norteamérica." I remember a Vanguardia headline from several years ago, "All América opposes Helms-Burton law." Obviously they didn't mean Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Idaho.

Fourth, the United States was the first of the European colonies to become independent, and had first choice of the name--an obvious choice, since the colonies were generally referred to in English as just "America," or as "British America." Subtract the British, and you get America. That's the origin of the name.

Fifth, it's a silly symbolic thing to get excited about anyway.

But Carlos Nadal had this to say in Sunday's La Vanguardia:

Sometimes apparently banal questions conceal more meaning than it seems. It happens when "estadounidenses" call their country "America," abusing the frequent semantic resource of referring to a part with the name of the whole. Is it a habit transmitted without malice, a custom that has no transcendence, confirmed by use during many generations?

The Americans from the rest of the continent are not indifferent. They reply, "We're all Americans!" It is as if the most American America, the one that should be paid most attentiom, the big, creative, rich, powerful one, had the privilege of taking the name of the whole continent. Consciously or unconsciously, there's something to this. It contains a feeling of superiority, of arrogance.

Oh, please. What this passage proves is that many Spanish-speakers and Latin Americans suffer from a marked inferiority complex due to wounded pride.

This was made very clear when President Monroe in 1823 immortalized the phrase, "America for the Americans."

No he didn't. That's a spurious quote. Nobody "said it first." In the early 19th century, it was a Nativist anti-immigrant slogan, and had nothing to do with Latin America whatsoever. I found a 1855 article using the phrase in the Nativist sense at Making of America, and I'll bet there are a lot more out there. I have no idea who attached it to the Monroe doctrine, which was welcomed in its day by the Latin Americans and was dependent on the British navy for its teeth until about 1890. However, I'll bet it was the same bunch of fun people who invented the other LatAm spurious quote, "He's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch." Not to mention inventing the phrase "premature anti-Fascist," or creating international causes celebres over the cases of guilty criminals like the Rosenbergs and Sacco and Vanzetti.

"Get your hands off America" came to mean "Only we have the right to put our hands there."

Oh, come on. Latin America, just like the United States itself, was developed by European capital, and was dominated by the Europeans until about the First World War. Generally, the rule was the farther south the country (Argentina, Uruguay), the more European the hegemony, and the farther north the country (Mexico, Cuba), the more American. Most of the German capital was confiscated during the First World War. Britain dominated the Argentinian economy as late as 1945. Britain, France, and Holland continued to own colonies on the South American mainland and in the Caribbean. France tried to build a canal at Panama and failed (the later American attempt, of course, succeeded), and actually did take over Mexico during the American Civil War.