Technology

I see this complaint from Spanish speakers a lot, but I don't really subscribe to it. The way I see it, "America" in Spanish and English are false friends.

False friends are when two words are written the same in two languages, but have different meanings. For example, the Swedish word for "ice cream" is "glass". We don't complain about the Swedish people using the word "glass" wrong, we accept that the word simply means something else in Swedish.

Sometimes false friends are rather subtle. The word "må" means "must" in Norwegian, but "may" in Danish. It's easy to misinterpret this, and you can't really infer it from context. You just have to know it.

Similarly, you just have to know that in English-speaking countries, there is no continent called "America" like there is in e.g. Argentina. The continental model used in these countries considers "North America" and "South America" separate continents. The word "America" does not refer to a continent in these countries, because there is no such continent in these countries. The collective word in English for what Spanish speakers call "America" would be "the Americas".

Since there is no continent called "America" in English-speaking countries, the word "America" can unambiguously be used as shorthand for "United States of America". And telling English native speakers that they're using a word in their own native language wrong is like telling a Swede that they're using the word "glass" wrong. It's ultimately their language, and we can't tell them what words should mean in it.