Comment by JumpCrisscross
Comment by JumpCrisscross 4 days ago
> Imagine what people would say about Cloudflare if they had an hour long outage
That Cloudflare had an outage. Not America.
Comment by JumpCrisscross 4 days ago
> Imagine what people would say about Cloudflare if they had an hour long outage
That Cloudflare had an outage. Not America.
In English, there is no continent named "America." It's unambiguously used to refer to the United States.
Continents are a social construct. In North American English, we typically divide the Americas into a North and South America. The collective noun for North and South America is the Americas. (Though this remains ambiguous in respect of the Caribbean and Pacific Islands.)
Getting pedantic about calling America America is sort of like insisting on referring to China as Zhonghua. Like, sure. Whatever. But you’re clearly insisting on substituting a substantial discussion with a semantic one.
I'm speaking as someone who has done a bit of research into this topic.
I'm not aware of a single example of an English-speaking country that teaches that there's a continent named "America." It's taught as two continents: North America and South America. "America" is just short for the "United States of America," and in English it's entirely unambiguous.
I would not say "unambiguously" when it comes to natural languages.
And no, "America" may have referred to the US when I was a kid and here in Central Europe we had Back to the Future type of shoes with the American flag, yeah, and I would not say unambiguously so.
If someone says "America" to refer to a place, they really ought to specify if they want you to understand them.
But America isn't a place. There's the Americas, as in plural, referring to the continents of North America and South America.
So America is unassigned, hence why we assigned it to the USA colloquially.
> That Cloudflare had an outage. Not America.
You probably mean the USA? After all, it was China and not Asia which was responsible for the incident ;)