Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.
The thread itself is a shitfest that boils down to idiocy on the same level as “is tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” and “ackshyually water is not wet it wets things”. And that includes both your comment and the comment that you’re replying to. Specially the later, as the guy found some weird hill to die on.
Even then, PTB. As typical for lemmy dot ml.
I’ll also address what estefano is saying in another comment in the same thread, as it’s outright misinformation:
In Brazil, we use USians or Statesians
Most people in the territory controlled by Brazil refer to people in the territory controlled by USA as “americanos” (lit. “Americans”). People who call them “estado-unidenses” (lit. “United-Statians”), like I do, are a minority. And people certainly do not call them by anything remotely translatable as “USians” (EUAnos? That sounds awful*) or “Statesians” (estadenses?).
I used the second one on an academic paper and it went through.
You can submit a lot of crap on academic papers and it’ll still go through. Welcome to Latin America. No, even better - welcome to the world in 2025, the institutions supposed to defend science against the Sturgeon’s Law are busier counting money than doing their job.
As such, “they accepted it” is NOT grounds to claim shite.
Ma que djanho.
*EUAnos sounds like “eu ânus” [I anus] for most Portuguese speakers. (It doesn’t for me but it gets really close.)
a tomato is both, a fruit and a vegetable, btw… those terms are not mutually exclusive, because things like fruit, root and leaves refer to the part of the plant, while vegetable refers to how it can be used.
You’re in the right direction. The only missing piece is the word “fruit” referring to two, partially overlapping, concepts:
- botanical - “fruit” as a part of the plant as opposed to stem, leaf, flower etc.
- culinary - “fruit” as an ingredient as opposed to vegetable, meat, seasoning etc.
Tomato is a botanical fruit, but not a culinary fruit. And this means that all those “mmh, ackshyually tomato is not a vegetable” claims you see in those discussions are simply a four terms fallacy.
And, more importantly, when people talk about fruits, you typically know which of those two concepts they’re talking about, due to the context (are we talking about plant development? or cooking?). And the same applies to “America” referring to the country bordering Canada versus the continent that country controls some territory of. (If you see the whole thing as a single continent, that is. That’s roughly as useful as to talk about Afro-Eurasia as a single continent.). And all those “ackshyually” tend to diverge the discussion from shit that matters into things that don’t matter.
It’s so weird how some people are so committed to this. “United Statesian” and variants thereof don’t actually solve the perceived problem due to the fact that Mexico is formally the United Mexican States (Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia were all United States of their own in the past too). And besides that, there are so many other examples of countries using the name of something they do not encompass the whole of. South Africa? Not actually the whole of the south of Africa, it turns out. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo? Both not the only country in the Congo basin. The European Union isn’t all of Europe, Sudan doesn’t include South Sudan, and the only part of the river Indus that’s in India is in disputed Kashmir
The Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo
I had no idea these were two separate nations
Ex-Belgian Congo and Ex-French Congo respectively. Which actually means they even share French as an official language. DR Congo is the really big one, and also the one more commonly in the news because it has generally had an extremely rough time of things. It was called Congo-Leopoldville upon gaining independence, then Zaire under a military government, and then finally DR Congo from the 90s up to today.
It’s quite common to refer to them by their capitals to distinguish them: DR Congo is Congo-Kinshasa, Rep. Congo is Congo-Brazzaville. Kinshasa is what they renamed the old capital Leopoldville to, quite understandably in my opinion given what Leopold was responsible for. To make this even weirder, Kinshasa and Brazzaville are literally just on opposite sides of the river from each other (although it is a very big river)
hell yeah brother this country is called america and if the latinos dont like it well too bad were not gonna let them mess with our perfectly good english i cant wait for trump to finally make english the national language and dissolve statehood into a meaningless distinction under his divine rule so we can get rid of that useless UnItEd StAtEs part in fact lets change the names of the continents to get rid of the confusion we can call south and central america spainica or something and make canada part of our country so we can just call it america
