Never thought of it like that before..

[Egbert]

Does Iraq include Vietnam?

[Dinner]

Vietnam had better food and more hookers.

[pchang]

Wrong...

...

...barbarian?

CONAN!!!!!!!

[Bereta_Eder]

There is no such thing as a wrong or right barbarian.
Either you are or you're not

[The Mad Monk]

CONAN!!!!!!!

[pchang]

I ask you, Father Crom, grant me victory, grant me revenge. And if you will not grant them to me; then the hell with you!

[Elok]

I wonder how the Vietnamese feel about Platoon / Full Metal Jacket / Rambo II / etc

My father-in-law went to VN during the war as a translator, and more or less went native. He goes to a Vietnamese Catholic church where they know him as Ong My. The title can be translated as "Mr. American" or "Beautiful Grandfather" due to ambiguities in the language. "America" is Ngoc My, with the first part being a generic word for "country" and the second meaning "beautiful." We're The Beautiful Country. Makes one wonder what exactly they used to call us before all the agent orange and Strategic Hamlet Relocation.

[kentonio]

Makes one wonder what exactly they used to call us before all the agent orange and Strategic Hamlet Relocation.

Why, you think they came up with that after the war?

[The Mad Monk]

I just googled and saw this..

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/u...neral-election

I am suspicious. I'd like to see cast iron guarantees that it would in no way **** with my non-resident status before I'd even think about this.

Why do you prize non-resident status over your privilege and duty as a UK citizen to participate in democratic elections?

[Elok]

Why, you think they came up with that after the war?

No, I just think it's odd that we shredded the hell out of their country and they still call us beautiful. I'm not totally sure why we're beautiful; possibly it has to do with their endless exposure to American pop culture and the notion that we own lots of crap and don't have to bribe the bo dai to do everything. My father-in-law notes that ironically, the Vietnamese have an extremely enterprising, even capitalist, culture. But that's speculation on my part. And that enterprising culture, for all I know, could be a reaction to living in a crummy communist state where they have to take the initiative to prosper.

My wife says Great Britain is Ngoc Anh (might be misspelling that), "the white [person] country." France's adjective, believe it or not, sounds a lot like "fop." And China's adjective, supposedly, is a two-word compound very similar to that used for goods of dubious quality.

[loinburger]

Are these official (e.g. France) vs unofficial (e.g. Smelly Frogland) names? If they're official then they might not change with the times very quickly.

[giblets]

We're "beautiful" because they borrowed their word for America from Chinese, and in Chinese they render foreign names using characters that are pronounced the same way, and there was a Chinese dialect where the second syllable in "America" sounds the same as a phoneme meaning "beautiful" so that phoneme was used. Originally they used four characters to render "America" but that got abbreviated to one (the second one).

Incidentally Japanese didn't use the same character for some reason so in Japanese the equivalent word could literally be broken down into "rice country".

[Elok]

. . . how on earth did you know that? Not doubting you, just wow.

[kentonio]

Why do you prize non-resident status over your privilege and duty as a UK citizen to participate in democratic elections?

My non-resident status is tied into me not having to pay tax in the UK. I pay tax in France. Voting in a system that currently has no viable options for me anyway currently means less than the idea of having to pay two lots of tax.

[kentonio]

. . . how on earth did you know that? Not doubting you, just wow.

Indeed, massive respect to giblets for that one!