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The average American uses "Britain" as a synonym for both the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and the sovereign state called the United Kingdom. Yes, it's
by kmeisthax 4y ago
The average American uses "Britain" as a synonym for both the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and the sovereign state called the United Kingdom. Yes, it's "incorrect" to you, but the NYT's audience is Americans, so it's fine.
- yakubin 4y agoUsing the correct name wouldn’t cause any confusion. A newspaper should be held to a higher standard than an average whatever.
- gausswho 4y agoThere are colloquialisms that err on factual basis (i.e. Third World). That doesn't mean it's fine for news headlines to use them over more accurate descriptions. You wouldn't excuse this from a health care provider.
- eldaisfish 4y agoThe point of literally any news item is communication. To the majority of people, Britain and the UK are synonyms despite one being geographical and the other being political. Pedantry at the expense of clarity is a tradeoff no sane person would make when writing news articles and headlines.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoSure I would. My doctor told me she was setting up an appointment for the "tetanus booster" a few weeks ago, and I wasn't super concerned when I discovered that the proper name for the booster is "Tdap" because it immunizes against diptheria and whooping cough as well.
- gausswho 4y agoUsing the layman term of 'tetanus booster' is acceptable to me in this case, even though it comes with additional benefit. But this simplification is not equivalent with the err of claiming a Prime Minister has charge over only a subset of their domain.
- mtalantikite 4y agoMaybe it's just because I'm a person of Irish descent in the US, but I've rarely, if ever, heard someone here refer to Ireland as Britain.
- anamexis 4y agoWe don't refer to just Ireland as Britain, but we do refer to the UK as a whole as Britain.
- mtalantikite 4y agoWell I guess I'm not a part of that "we", and I suspect quite a lot of people of Irish descent wouldn't be a part of it either. As another comment has pointed out, Great Britain does exclude Northern Ireland, and official language refers to it as "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" [1]. People will generally specify Northern Ireland, and I've pretty much never heard anyone say, I don't know, "I'm going to Belfast, it'll be nice to hang out in Britain". Do British people normalize referring to the entire thing as just Britain? Yeah, probably. But the colonizer will always try to normalize erasing you and replacing your language with their own. [1] https://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/united-kingdom https://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/united-king...
- anamexis 4y agoYes, I'm well aware that Ireland is not in Great Britain. That does not change the point that many people in the US (who are of course not Ireland's colonizers) use Britain to refer to the UK as a whole. No one in the US would say "I'm going to Belfast, it'll be nice to hang out in Britain." It's shorthand for referring to the state. As in, "Britain has a new PM."
- implements 4y agoI’m British but also of Irish descent (and also an Irish citizen) - might I suggest that you’re being a bit unnecessarily sensitive to find fault with people from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland abbreviating that to “Britain” in day to day usage. Also, “coloniser” from an American, America being literally a far more recent European colonial enterprise built on resource appropriation and African slavery … ? Somewhat ironic that the injustices of Anglo-Irish history seems to resonate more with you than perhaps injustices closer to home.
- closewith 4y agoI'm Irish and lived in the States for years and never once heard this use of the term British. It would not have been received well.