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A request to our friends from across the pond: please stop shouting/screaming/screeching "[X] isn't a state/province/prefecture, [X] is a country!" We've heard you and it makes no sense.

Whenever someone refers one of the UK's primary subnational administrative regions as, well, not a country. This particular phrase/screech has become so common that it might as well be country's national motto (the UK never bothered to choose one). For non-Brits and Brits who skipped geography, I'm referring to England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland -- the territories that make up the modern United Kingdom and the tendency of those territories' residents to refer to them as countries. "Country," it should be noted, has no widely-accepted legal definition, which makes the Brits' fanatical insistence on using the term for its geographical divisions even stranger.

The crux of the problem is twofold: first, the UK's constituent ”countries” don't have any real power over their external affairs, which makes them virtually identical to any of the provinces/states/prefectures/oblasts/etc found in other developed nations, and second, in modern English, "country" is almost exclusively used to refer to sovereign states and not subnational divisions; to the modern English speaker, Chile, Cambodia, and Namibia are countries, while Saskatchewan, Kansas, and Queensland are not.

"Bu-but Michael," you might say, "The constituent regions of the UK are able to secede through referendum! Surely this must make them different and special!" I'll use this opportunity to remind you that that Quebec as well as a boatload of subnational divisions of EU countries have the same ability. Unincorporated US territories can also secede, but last I checked nobody was calling Puerto Rico a country.

So, Britain, my proposal is this: call your administrative divisions whatever you want so long as it isn’t:

1. Deliberately misleading, and
2. A bit self-important. I mean come on, calling Northern Ireland a country is like calling a 2006 Nissan Altima a supercar.

We all know that "country" in contemporary English implies a sovereign state. None of the UK's subnational divisions meets those criteria - not England, not Scotland, not Wales, and certainly not Northern Ireland. And yet they insist on calling them countries. Worse, they insist on condescendingly correcting anyone who refers to these subnational territories as anything other than countries. “Aaaachtually," they say (likely fully erect at the chance to correct a foreigner on UK-specific semantics), "Wales is a country."

The true kicker here is that they do this despite knowing full well that the government of Wales is not designed to operate the capacity of a sovereign state, but instead to address to matters of regional and local concern.

Look, Britain - no one is fooled by your grandiose divisional labels. It's painfully clear to the rest of us that UK citizens are holding on to any and every measure of distinctiveness they can scrounge up, likely as a means to distract themselves from the fact that the United Kingdom is undergoing one of the fastest geopolitical declines in human history.

On the other hand, maybe it's just run-of-the-mill pretentiousness. Either way, calling Scotland a country doesn't make it one, at least not in the sense that the vast majority of the English-speaking world understands that term.

One final note: this goes for you too, Denmark. Calling the Greenland and the Faroe Islands "countries" is just as misleading as Brits applying that label to Northern Ireland, but your citizens are less annoying/preachy about it, and there aren't that many of you, which is why this post is directed at the UK.

TLDR: Brits, stop calling your subnational administrative divisions "countries," or, failing that, stop condescendingly correcting the rest of the world with a term that strongly implies something fundamentally different.

Submitted December 30, 2018 at 05:44PM by Michael_Huntington http://bit.ly/2QWDVWs
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December 30, 2018 at 08:50PM
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December 31, 2018 at 12:25AM