Yeah, she was a very smart person, IIRC she was studying aeronautical engineering, literally a rocket scientist. Just one of those weird ways that you don't think about your bias until it smacks you in the face.
Yes, because there are multiple Romance languages spoken in Spain, and they're all "Spanish" to people who live there. Castellano is the one spoken in Madrid, so it's what the rest of the world thinks of as Spanish, kind of like how Mandarin is often referred to as Chinese even though other dialects are equally Chinese.
I had the opposite argument with one Indian guy when I was living in the UK.
He was saying what people speak in countries like Mexico, Argentina, etc. cannot be called Spanish because they are not from Spain and instead they speak Mexican, Argentinian...
I told him what they speak in those countries is still Spanish the same way that what they speak in the US is English even when they are not in England. He replied that what they speak in America is not English either but American instead.
Then I realized how stubborn he was in his wrongness and just gave up.
I was expecting something else when I clicked this post. "En España se habla español" is something you would expect to hear from a Spanish Nationalist as a way of attacking Spain's other languages.
No, can confirm there are far too many people this ignorant. I work with a good number of them. I'm in North Georgia, and some of these people literally can't find themselves on a map of the United States and believe the English folks stole English from the Americans...
I live in Seattle but I hail from the atl metro, I can confirm this is not uncommon, my mother asked me where Canada “ended” yesterday… she thought it was just above nyc