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.
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:
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?).
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:
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.
I’m really disappointed at how it went down, because I was actually at first really enjoying the discussion of linguistics and geography and how they intersect.
I think it really went south once dessalines piped up. Which…shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose.
Yeah. And this would make some really great topic for Sociolinguistic research - local demonyms for outsiders vs. attitude towards those outsiders. This stuff sometimes changes even within a linguistic community.