This is a puzzle that I first heard in high school; it was during a summer program in the mid 1980’s.  It goes like this:

A man drives in a car with his son; they tragically get into a car accident. The father dies at the scene; the son, badly injured, is taken into the local hospital by the ambulance.

At the hospital, the doctor examines the patient and says, “I can’t operate on this boy; he’s my son.”

Now, explain how this is possible.  I’ll allow you to ponder on that one for a few minutes.

Your eyes have a literal blind spot; it’s where the optic nerve connects.  This is a location where you literally can’t see and it’s in your peripheral vision.  You don’t see ‘darkness’; your brain simply ‘completes’ the image based on what is around it.  I’m sure there are many ways to demonstrate it through a quick web search; it’s a little startling when you first try it.

I like this puzzle because it illustrates the difference between what people hear and what was actually said.  People will instantly choreograph the narrative in their head and imagine possibilities.  It’s a ‘mental’ blind spot if you will.

As you ponder through the above puzzle, many responses will wander into the realm of two gay fathers, though as mentioned above I first heard this during the 1980’s… Or a step father… or biological father (of an adopted boy)… or an adopted father, et cetera.  The answer is considerably simpler than that:

The doctor is the boy’s mother.

There are many people, including women, who miss this possibility because we envision a man for a doctor.

There was an ongoing joke among a group of friends.  “Tom doesn’t wear pants to work.”  Our friend Tom, who was from the Chicago area where it was considerably colder, would wear shorts year around.  My response was “Shorts are pants.”  This started a long discussion and, in some circles, continues to this day.  For reference, here’s the definition of pants:

an outer garment covering each leg separately and usually extending from the waist to the ankle

Emphasis mine.  Actually, even underpants are pants; hence the name.  Basically, any garment with a separate hole for each leg is a pair of pants.

Now, I’ll give you that if you ask someone if they ask if you will be wearing shorts today and you respond with, “I’m wearing pants.”  It will imply that you’re wearing long pants, but it doesn’t necessarily exclude shorts.

I’ll often say that the burden of communicating an idea lies more in the one who is doing the expressing rather than the one who doing the interpreting (that is the writer/speaker over the reader/listener).  That said, we shouldn’t be burdened by the array of different biases everyone will inherit.  Take the example of the puzzle above, should we mention that the doctor was a woman in order to overcome your bias?

That said, I’ll concede that when people hear ‘pants’, most people will assume that I refer to long pants.  As long as you also acknowledge that shorts are pants.

Please just stop saying that when I wear shorts to work, that I’m not wearing pants.  I’m wearing two pairs of pants; shorts and underpants… Thank you very much.

Do I really care about the classification of shorts as pants?  Not really, it’s just an ongoing joke among friends.  It all just serves to illustrate what we think about when we hear certain words.

That said, I live in the United States (and am a proud citizen) and the name of the country is [insert pause for drama]… the United States.

With that let’s look up the definition of American:

1. an American Indian of North America or South America
2. a native or inhabitant of North America or South America
3. a native or inhabitant of the U.S. : a U.S. citizen

I put emphasis on the most inclusive of the terms for a reason.  As before, I’ll grant you that particularly when used in here in the United States, the term American typically refers to #3 above (much like we normally think of the word ‘pants’ to refer to long pants).

However, when you are using it explicitly to describe the United States to the exclusion of others, then stop using the term ‘American’, use United States citizen.  Here are some examples:

• “Ceasar Milan (The Dog Whisperer) is not American; he was born in Mexico.” – First, Mexico is part of North America and hence he has technically been an American since he was born.  Second, he was naturalized in 2009 and is now a US citizen.
• “This is America; we speak English here.” Since America is the entire Western world, we also speak Spanish (many countries), Portuguese (Brazil), and French (Canada).
• “We don’t have socialized health care in America.” Again, Canada does this pretty well, so STFU.

All I’m saying is that if you’re going to refer to the United States to the exclusion of other countries in the Western world, then say precisely that “United States”; to continue to use ‘America’ or ‘American’ is just plain wrong.

Hey, I get it… ‘United States citizen’ just doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely as ‘American’ (or Canadian, for that matter).  Truthfully, most of the time it doesn’t matter…  If you say that Bill Gates is American, then it’s true either by country standards or western hemisphere standards.

That said, Americans (yes, #3 above) can’t just ‘cookie-lick’ a term and declare it as theirs.  You don’t own the English language; it is used everywhere.  You can’t even lay claim to the name of the language; it was established in England, hence the name.  Just because you have the inclination to hijack the term from the rest of the Western world and make it definitively yours doesn’t automatically make it so.  What’s next?  Are you going to commandeer the word ‘human’ from the rest of humanity?

The United States is not the only country or region named with common words.  There’s also the United Kingdom and the Virgin Islands, for instance.  If you have a problem with the name being too wordy, you can blame the founding fathers.

For me, if I were to start a company where there’s some level of manufacturing and it happens to end up in either Canada or Mexico…  I’ll proudly put a ‘Made in America’ label on it.  I’d be very amused to see the litigation for that: “Explain to me how Canada is not part of America when it is defined to be that way…”