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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

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

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...

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.

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