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Comment by graboidhunter | Hacker News Reader

A similar aspect is the replacement of American with US Citizen. This would exclude American Samoans who are non-citizen nationals of the United States.

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Canadians, Mexicans, ... , Argentinians are all geographically in the Americas.

Perhaps that one is just about being geographically precise?

This is a fair point. But there's no adjective (in English) for a person or thing that is from the United States. In Spanish they use the word estadounidense for this, but I can't think of an easily pronounceable analog in English. It would be handy to have!

Yankee?

That would offend many people in the southeastern United States

true. i think Yanks is common though for overseas referal to US citizens, since they don't bother honoring the confederacy or something like that.

Most of the online dictionaries I checked showed that "Yankee" is a derogatory or possibly offensive word, including in British English. This is not a purely domestic (US-based) connotation.

> Most of the online dictionaries I checked showed that "Yankee" is a derogatory or possibly offensive word, including in British English. This is not a purely domestic (US-based) connotation.

I believe Yankee originated in the Revolutionary War era as a kind of slur used by the British against Americans, but then was reappropriated.

> Perhaps that one is just about being geographically precise?

But the serious issue with that is that it denies an entire nationality their native endonym.

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