It’s been exactly 8 years since this was posted and honestly, I don’t think we have an answer yet. But all of what Eric posted back then still stands. – Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine) Baen’s Bar 24 April 2018 17:24 I can give you a few guidelines: 1) It won’t be “German,” for two reasons. First, not all Germans will be citizens of the USE. Austria is also a German nation, and if Bavaria retains its independence (which is still an open question) it will be also. Second, not all citizens of the USE are Germans. That’s already true and will become more true as things progress. (Tum te tum te tum…) Finally, there will be considerable political resistance to making the citizenship and ethnic terms synonymous. 2) It won’t be “Amideutsch.” The idea is preposterous. 3) There are two most likely possibilities: a) Someone who knows German better than I do may come up with a nifty way to solve the issue. “Vereinigen” (or something similar — I don’t remember the exact spelling) has already been suggested. b) Somebody comes up with something completely off the wall. These things do happen, after all. The term “American” came off the wall. So did the term “Ram Rebellion.” So did the terms “Yankee” and “Yank.” So did the term “Dixie.” My own preference would be for alternative 3-b. What about a term like “Yankee”? The following was in response to: Yankee didn’t come from nowhere. I read that the earliest use in English referred to the Dutch, from Janke, a diminutive of Jan. The association with the New England colonies is most likely because of 17th century Nieuw Nederland colony, which was taken over by the English as a result of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. 25 April 2018 05:52 When I said “came from nowhere,” I didn’t mean that the term literally had no connection to anything. All…
USE
Eric wasn’t perfect, and he would have been the first one to say so. Below is his comment on the bar regarding why there are 8 stars on the USE flag. But after that is what Mike Nagle wrote in the Grantville Gazette. The reason was given in the original novel 1632, something Eric wrote more than 20 years before his Bar post. It’s easy to think that an author will remember everything they’ve written, but that simply isn’t the case. It especially isn’t the case when it’s been decades with many books in that series and multiple totally unrelated series having been written in the interrim. Personally, I think it’s pretty amazing that we have so many writers and fans who can help us keep track of all these details even when we forget them. – Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine) Baens Bar 20 February 2020 00:59 I’m guessing, because BALTIC WAR was written so long ago that my memory is fuzzy, but I suspect the reason there are eight stars on the cross of the USE flag is simply because that’s how many our artist Tom Kidd put on it and it didn’t occur to me at the time to think about the logic behind it. There’s no logic at all to having it based on the original cities in the New United States. What would make sense would be to do it the way the USA’s flag works, which is to add a star every time a new province is formed. Then — oh, joy! — we can have endless wrangles because the imperial cities start clamoring that they damn well ought to be represented on the flag as well as the provinces, and grouchier members of the CoCs would insist that provinces under imperial administration shouldn’t be given the same august status as self-governing provinces. Mike Nagle (excerpted from 1632 and Flags of…