this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
246 points (88.4% liked)

Asklemmy

43866 readers
1571 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word "female", is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?

I don't know if this is the best place to ask, if it's not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I know that this is popular especially among Latin American speakers, but the phrase "US-American" is very unidiomatic in English and makes you stand out quite significantly. In English, the term "American" means someone from the United States of America. It's clear enough because "America" is always a shortened form of that country, while the large western hemisphere landmass is collectively "the Americas", since the anglosphere almost universally uses a seven-continent model with North and South America being two continents (and with some more "enlightened" people preferring a six-continent model merging Eurasia—but you'll rarely find a native English speaker who refers to "America" as a single continent).

[–] gapbetweenus@feddit.de 3 points 8 months ago

You got it, I just happen to have quite some friends from south and middle America and since it was important to them and make sense to me I took it over in my vocabulary.