United States or America?

After reading something yesterday I realized I've never once, when asked where I'm from or where I live, replied with "America" ... but instead have always said "the United States" or just "U.S." even though the official title of our country is the United States of America. It was a weird realization.

Anyone else call it the U.S./United States or is your first answer always America?

Interesting thought experiment if nothing else.

The Congress renamed the country the day I was born, 195 years earlier: Congress renames the nation “United States of America”

 

It was the Schwarzenegger video in which he talked about the importance of "America" that got me thinking about my own experience with that word.

 

What if the guy who realized this was the New World was named something other than Amerigo Vespucci? We could be the United States of De Soto or Drake.

 

Although the United States of Zzyzx would be pretty cool.

 

United States of Erikson

 

If TigerVols was named emperor (and what a glorious day that would be!) I would dissolve all the states and municipal governments and have two governments, Federal and county. Each county would have three elected reps “sent” to a national parliament (meeting completely online) and the counties’ borders would be population based and would be altered every census by a computer to keep them all pretty much the same size.

 

Since the Vikings came first, we could be the United States of Thor.

 

To answer the OP, I have used all three when traveling abroad, though I’ve used “the United States” the least (probably just for brevity).

My experience speaking with many Germans, Australians and Southeast Asians while in Thailand was that they mostly called it America. While traveling in Central America, people mostly referred to us as the U.S.

 

My response to the reply "America" would be, "Can you be more specific?"
As in North? South? Central?

 

Actually when I've been traveling most people don't ask where you're from they just say, are you an American? I will probably say the US

 

United States or U.S.. Far prefer United States/U.S. over America. As someone above said, "America" encompasses the rest of North and all of Central and South.

I kind of don't like it when the Canadian radio station I stream refers to the U.S. as America. But that's their choice.

Don't like it when someone from the U.S. is called the "first American to [do something]."

 

USA! USA!