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Comment by Lendal | Hacker News Reader

Pet peeve: This story alternates between "nations" and "countries" as if they were synonyms. A nation is a group of people sharing cultural, ethnic, and historical ties. There are many more nations than there are countries, especially within the US. A country has a political boundary, a flag and an anthem. It's one thing to use a word in the wrong way, because maybe you don't know the other word exists, and that's okay. But it's really annoying to hear both words being used in the same story but alternating them, without any explanation as to why. Is this an AI generated story?

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Pet peeve: Misguided pedantry

Both “country” and “nation” have a wide variety of definitions, and several of them overlap.

The definition you give for “nation” is a particular technical one used in certain contexts, but the word used for the way you define “country” in the context where that kind of technical definition is being used for “nation” is “state”, not “country”. (And even “state” may be used with additional qualifiers to disambiguate the exact sense when used for that, because it is a heavily-overloaded term.)

Pet peeve: Not enough pedantry with language use in publications.

Nation and country are not interchangeable. Words have meaning. Good journalist choose their words deliberately and have a deeper understand of language than the average person.

Sure, words certainly have meaning, but that meaning is constantly evolving and even differs from person to person.

For the common person and the common definition and use of the two words, they are very much interchangeable. The common person might not even notice the change in words because the generally used definitions of both are common enough.

With all due respect, I’ve simply never heard anyone use these terms “correctly”. I live in an English-speaking country, and the closest thing I’ve seen to this is university signs that say things like “this is tiger nation” or something similar. But I’ve also seen people use “country” to express that too.

I assume they’re alternating not because it’s AI written but because the author considered them synonymous and wanted it to sound less repetitive.

These words are just so overloaded that I think this is a lost battle. People hike in the back-country, you can live in the city or the country. And frankly if you used “nation” to represent a cultural group of people in almost any context I think people would not understand or worse - assume you were stoking some racial angst or land-dispute.

Hence the name of the major intercountryal governing body, the United Countries.

It's TechCrunch, pretty much the bottom of the barrel.

I'm not sure this is true

> There are many more nations than there are countries, especially within the US.

Each US state has "a political boundary, a flag and an anthem". So that's 50 of them. How many nations are there in the US?

It’s “true” if you, as the GP seems to intend to, define “country” to be “state that is sovereign in the sense of a principal subject of international law”.

This is, to say the least, not the only definition of a “country” (and is also among the definitions of “nation”.)

"Country" definitely does not mean "sovereign states" in English.

And I do mean "English" because in the UK, England, Scotland and Wales are officially considered "countries" by the UK government...

If you care, you definitely need to specify what you mean, e.g. the British gameshow "Pointless" has a catch phrase:

"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right"

So if you're asked for "country names ending in land" on the show they'll invariably remind you of the definition and you ought to then know Scotland is plain wrong, whereas Ireland is a reasonable although obvious (so not "Pointless") attempt to answer.

> There are many more nations than there are countries, especially within the US.

I took this to include things like first nations and reservations which are themselves "sovereign".

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