“It has been thought advisable to give more space to the usage of the United States of America than is commonly done in smaller English dictionaries, because the interaction of the two great branches of the English language is steadily increasing…. As the distinction of American usages is of considerable importance, they are marked by an asterisk * prefixed to a word, phrase or meaning; and the sign must be understood as a mark of territorial origin or use, not as an indication of inferiority.—Preface to the Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English, third edition.
For quite obvious reasons the previous quotation reminds me of the many educated Americans I met in the USA, who claimed to have studied Spanish, but made sure to add, it was Castilian Spanish. Once they were tested, many had very limited mastery of the language -limited, indeed- and did not know that Castilian and Spanish were "sinónimos", more so in Latin América than in some parts of Spain. And if you were a Puerto Rican who spoke a different variety of Spanish, they were not willing to learn about their limitations, due to the "mark of territorial origin"; perhaps they viewed it "as an indication of inferiority."
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