Perhaps because my birthday falls a day later, I am very aware of the 4th July. For all its faults, I like America for its grand scale and positive attitude, and I have been lucky to count a number of Americans as my friends. But what am I? A yankophile?
Foreigners who like us Brits are called anglophiles. Actually that means they like the English, but no one could possibly like them without also liking us Scots. Bizarrely we also have a word, frankophile, for those who like the French, or maybe it's just France, but we do not have a word for people who like any other nation; we do not refer to krautophiles or spanophiles or polophiles or japophiles. Does this gap in the lexicon betray xenophobia, or do we just like everyone (except possibly the French)as a matter of course?
Be that as it may, Lincoln's description of 'a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal' rings out as powerfully in cyberspace as it did over the blood-soaked field of Gettysburg.
I'm proud to be a yankophile.