Fair enough. And I hadn’t heard that story about the teacher and the Bible before, so thanks for sharing that.
On the semantic issue, I’ll agree to disagree on this. But if you’re interested in why the word “tribe” in particular gets used, a book called Albion’s Seed might be of interest. It shows how the United States can be roughly broken up into large regions with very distinct cultures, which developed because of historical migration patterns. Several subgroups can even be traced back to specific communities in Britain; some were then supplemented by different waves of mainland Europeans, Irish, Hispanics, and Asians.
Jayman’s blog has a condensed explanation complete with pretty maps. I think he also mentions that there is now genetic evidence corroborating the story of how these cultures spread via different settlement waves.
