Usania
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Usania (also written USANIA or USAnia) is another name for the country known to most people as the United States of America (USA). The creation and original use of the name clearly had political overtones and the usage was at least in part satirical. It stemmed from the perception held by many people outside of the USA that the citizens of that country have been arrogant in arrogating unto themselves the title "Americans", when in fact the citizens of Canada, Brazil and Tierra del Fuego are all equally American (see article on Cultural relativism). An example of the sense of the usage of the term can be found at http://echonews.com/901/letters.htmln (Feb 2006):
"Partly as a personal protest against the overweening nature of the United States of America, and partly as a shorthand way of indicating exactly which part of the globe he's referring to, a friend recently coined the term "USAnia" (you-say-knee-ah). A rather tidy solution I thought and one many of his friends have since adopted. So the term USAnophile denotes someone with a liking for all things USAnian. And I used USAnophilia to describe a condition suffered by someone who has taken that liking to an unjustifiable extent".
However, the above claim of origin for the name Usania is clearly unconvincing. The term was already well established in certain circles in Australia in the 1990's. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/skeptic/message/15275
The term is now used by some with no apparent sense of irony. See for example http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/2000/10425.html :
"It has been painfully obvious for some time that much of the rest of the World knows more than the citizens of USAnia do about the ideological imbroglio that that has laid siege to the potential peace and sustainability of humanity as a whole. For examples 'collateral damage' in Afghanistan far outweighs the number of US citizens killed on 9/11 - but even if you know, that's OK even if it does mean that a new generation of orphaned 'terrorists' is now growing up with good reason to hate USAnia. And US energy pollices will arguably kill trillions of humans - but that's OK too because a significant turnaround may damage the US economy" (sic).
The epithet is now employed by some residents in the USA itself; see http://skeptilog.pitas.com/ and there is a discussion of the term (and many equivalent neologisms for the USA) at http://www.factspider.com/us/usanian.html
