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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15192 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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The Ukraine, on the other hand, also guaranteed its neutrality. It's supposedly an article in the treaty that established the Ukraine as an independent nation in 1991. Don't quote me on that though, I've only heard it from an acquaintance who claims to have read it.

Calling "Ukraine", the self-chosen English language name of a sovereign state "the Ukraine", an obsolete toponym for an ill-defined region of Tsarist Russia, is a tell. In this case it is also a factual error - "the Ukraine" has never been an independent state, and didn't become one in 1991. If you want to spread Kremlin talking points on a forum where the average IQ is north of 115 then you should, as they say round here, git gud.

It is also, of course, relevant that Ukraine had not actually violated its purported obligations of neutrality at the time Putin invaded.

There's something hilarious about simultaneously praising yourself by proxy, while simultaneously engaging in the intellectually laziest, literally an online meme style argument; "everyone I don't like is Putler!"

No, calling it "the Ukraine" isn't a fucking "tell," it's a mistake millions make, up to and including Presidents, and will likely continue to make. Hell, in all likelihood, if a week from now someone holds a gun to my head and demands to know if it's "Ukraine" or "the Ukraine," there's a 50/50 chance I'll have forgotten this thread and get it wrong.

Watching people bristle at the word "the" is amusing enough that I sometimes do it out of contrarianism. I have no opinion whatsoever.

As far as I'm concerned, leaving your own country to retain the name 'borderland/periphery' is dumb as fuck, especially if you claim to be a staunch patriot. It literally means that you're defining your country according to its position from the perspective of neighbors whom you happen to mostly hate. (For centuries, the Poles and the Russians called the same region the Ukraine, because it was the borderland/periphery of both.) So I can understand the political motivation of Ukrainian nationalists to evict the name 'the Ukraine' from the vocabulary of international relations. Still, insisting that it's actually the 'the' that makes the difference is moronic. If you want to define your homeland as a proud nation unto itself and not as the appendage of the Russian imperial state, you might as well simply rename it.

All calling that state "the Ukraine" means, for most, is that the speaker is old.

Right, even the drunken guy on Anderson Cooper's New Years show (which was terrible by the way), called it the Ukraine while very definitely being on their side. And back in the 90's we certainly called it the Ukraine as well. Even nowadays I'll go back and forth without (as far as I can tell) being impacted by Russian propaganda.

Do you call the Netherlands the Netherlands or “Netherlands”?

Do you call a country “neutral” after its legislature specifically amended the national constitution for it to declare that national membership in NATO in the future is inexorable?

My favorite name for it is the French one; literally, "low country".

it's also worth noting that the language spoken there calls itself 'Nederlands'. It's kind of like how the Franks speak Frankish, and very much how the Deutsch speak Deutsch.

I call it ‘the Netherland’ a literal translation of my grandfather’s ‘de Nederland’, for what it’s worth- most people call it holland.

But I imagine most Dutch don't call their country 'Holland' as it's not completely synonymous with the Netherlands in terms of geography and history, do they?

No, most Americans call it holland, I see no point in getting upset with them.

The formal self-chosen English name of the sovereign state commonly known as "The Netherlands" is "Kingdom of the Netherlands" - in other words "the" is part of the name. TIL that the Dutch authorities use "Netherlands" without "the" to refer specifically to the core part of the Kingdom excluding partially self-governing overseas territories (which nevertheless includes the non-self-governing overseas territories, such that "Dutch Mainland" refers to yet another thing that is not "Netherlands" or "Kingdom of the Netherlands", also commonly known as "the Netherlands" by foreigners). But most foreigners talking about the Netherlands are not trying to make that kind of fine-grained distinction. I wouldn't complain about a foreigner not knowing the legal difference between "Great Britain" and "Britain" or "The British Isles" and "The British Islands".

On the other hand, calling the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland "England", calling the Kingdom of the Netherlands "Holland", or calling Ukraine "The Ukraine" is either culpably ignorant or malicious.

The equally malicious, ignorant, insensitive etc. naming would be 'Little Russia', 'Greater Novorossiya' or something similar.

Also, I'm sure that the reason foreigners use the name 'the Netherlands' is not that it's the shortening of the official name of the state by dropping the 'KIngdom' part, but to differentiate it from 'netherlands' as a geographic category.

Eh, let's not go that far. We called the Netherlands Holland back in my day in the UK , so I sometimes use it even nowadays, same with the Ukraine. The Netherlands themselves only officially dropped support for using Holland in 2019.

There is no way that qualifies as being culpably ignorant. Likewise I have lost track of the number of people in the US who equate British with England (and indeed Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland). As Wikipedia itself says:

"Holland" is informally used in English and other languages, including sometimes the Dutch language itself, to mean the whole of the modern country of the Netherlands.[5] This example of pars pro toto or synecdoche is similar to the tendency to refer to the United Kingdom as "England",[9][10] and developed due to Holland's becoming the dominant province and thus having the majority of political and economic interactions with other countries.[11]

If the Dutch themselves sometimes still use Holland and only officially stopped using it with in the last 5 years, then I struggle to imagine that anyone outside of the country can be called culpably ignorant or malicious, for not keeping updated on that.

It's technically incorrect but it is entirely understandable in all of your examples. Especially for anyone over 30. And I am a Northern Irish Brit who quite often gets called either English or Irish depending. For most people outside of the UK, there just isn't any need to learn that that is technically incorrect. It has no impact on their lives at all.

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