Spyke

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rule

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It doesn't have to be. I managed to fill my car up with diesel accidentally once... the nozzle was the same size, just a different color (which I didn't notice until much too late).

books

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Looking for "R-rated", gritty, gorey high fantasy books

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Hah, I did mean it in the spirit of good discussion. (Though maybe I also feel like I have a sacred mission to keep the unwary from inadvertently Goodkinding themselves!)

I've actually been having a hard time getting into anything new lately for some reason, but I recently reread C. S. Friedman's Coldfire and Magister series (serieses? trilogies), which are kind of dark, but not so "gritty, gorey" that I thought they'd be a good recommendation for this thread. The former in particular is excellent, and they're both fairly unusual takes on fantasy.

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Non-Americans who have been to the US.. What is the weirdest thing about America that Americans don't realize is weird?

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Calling yourself Americans, after the entire dual continent

But we never use "America" to refer to North and South America collectively. You can say "the Americas", or just "North and South America". And there's no adjective that means "of the Americas"; you can say "North or South American". But just "American" unambiguously means "of the USA".

I've always wondered if disagreement over this comes from the fact that in some parts of the world, North and South America are considered to be one continent just called "America", whereas we consider them to be two separate continents. And we don't have a word for the pair of continents, any more than we have a word for Europe and Africa together. (I mean we do have "Eurasia", which kind of pokes a hole in the hypothesis, but maybe that's a special case because a brief glance at a map makes it clear it's pure fantasy to count those as separate continents.)

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