Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.

    • Skua@kbin.earth
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      9 hours ago

      Ex-Belgian Congo and Ex-French Congo respectively. Which actually means they even share French as an official language. DR Congo is the really big one, and also the one more commonly in the news because it has generally had an extremely rough time of things. It was called Congo-Leopoldville upon gaining independence, then Zaire under a military government, and then finally DR Congo from the 90s up to today.

      It’s quite common to refer to them by their capitals to distinguish them: DR Congo is Congo-Kinshasa, Rep. Congo is Congo-Brazzaville. Kinshasa is what they renamed the old capital Leopoldville to, quite understandably in my opinion given what Leopold was responsible for. To make this even weirder, Kinshasa and Brazzaville are literally just on opposite sides of the river from each other (although it is a very big river)