She Put South Carolina on the Map

I'm not posting the Miss South Carolina video with the thought that I'm offering you a funny new video that you haven't seen yet. If you've even logged on to the Internet in the past couple of weeks, you've undoubtedly already encountered this travesty. It's already one of the most watched videos on the web ever. (Funny how this incident has accidentally given Mario Lopez the most exposure he has received in his entire career.) Certainly, Miss South Carolina is all sorts of dumb. And to think, I had just been trying to overcome my bias toward beauty pageant participants. Still, there's been one main criticism toward this person that I feel it necessary to address: the use of "U.S. Americans."

Far be it from me to defend this contestant, but modifying the term American as “U.S. American” is actually appropriate. In truth, it's not as redundant as it seems. There is a dispute in the international community over what “American” means. Though most people use it to reference the United States specifically, others utilize it to refer to the entire continent or even hemisphere. Much like you might call someone in northern Asia “Asian”, you might say of a North American individual residing in Mexico is “American” as well - the same applying to someone from South America. For example, many people refer to people of Latin America as “Americans,” demonstrating just how relative the term can be.

From the looks of it, however, Miss South Carolina doesn’t even know what the word “map” means, so I’m only offering this perspective up as a possibility rather than a defense. Maybe she would offer up this argument if she were able to articulate a coherent sentence.