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Comment by century19 | Hacker News Reader

-- Calling such people ‘Vikings’ would be like calling 18th century British, French or Dutch naval officers ‘pirates’ simply because they wore vaguely similar hats and sailed vaguely similar ships to Blackbeard.

Thing is, pirates like Blackbeard were doing the same thing the British navy were doing, they just stopped giving the loot back to the Empire. Where do people think they got the boats from? So the navy kind of were pirates, or at least engaged in that activity, albeit sanctioned by government at home.

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> they just stopped giving the loot back to the Empire.

And they were not under the control of the empire.

Freelancers were an active part of British military strategy, while pirates acted on their own.

I agree that distinction was probably irrelevant for the rest of the world, but you can understand why media and culture in the empire would value and depict them quite differently :)

> albeit sanctioned by government at home

That’s kind of a biggie, innit? What a strange point to make.

But you wouldn't call the people of Great Britain pirates.

The piece does a very poor job of establishing whether any sizable fraction of people actually misuse the word in the way they claim. Even Hollywood managed to get it right with "The Norseman", not "The Viking".

And the Norsemen/Normans invaded England and took over. They went native and became English after a while. Then started The British Empire.

Before that they had mostly gone native and become French first.

Very true, effectively French speaking Vikings. Who changed the English language to include lots of French.

We can see the fingerprints in the way food is named: pork/pig, beef/cow, etc. The French word was used when serving the Normans at the table, and the English word was used in the field.

That was the later “Normans” who were Norse that invaded the area of France and learned French. They invaded England a couple of hundred years after the original Norse invasions.

Of course the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th century were barely distinguishable from the later Norse.

You wouldn't... but there is a somewhat old-fashioned tendency to do so in Spain (motivated by old imperial rivalries) and in Argentina (idem plus the Falklands affair).

See for instance (in Spanish):

- https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirata_(despectivo)

- https://es.quora.com/Por-qué-los-ingleses-son-llamados-pirat...

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