I was reading an article today about the Oxford-Cambridge boat race and discovered that it’s name is The Boat Race. As if there is any other?
British postage stamps don’t have a country designation on them.
The biographical source Who’s Who is for Britain also. The other are Who’s Who in Country X.
Are there other examples?
{brought to you by the country that calls its basketball and baseball winners WORLD CHAMPIONS}
Warm Beer
The House of Commons
The House of Lords
The Admiralty
The Channel
etc
etc
etc
It’s cos Britain rules the world. We kick ass. We dont need to rub it in you just know.
The first two wouldn’t necessarily take “British” as their adjective, but the logic still holds.
The Times
The Championships (Wimbledon)
The Commonwealth
Royal Air Force/Navy/Marines - but “British Army”
The Automobile Association
The Football League.(soccer to you murricans - sigh -)
There was no other football league when it was first started.
Many of these cover England, or England and Wales, rather than the UK: the Football Association, The Rugby Football Union, The Youth Hostels Association (not the first in the world, I would guess), the National Trust. Scotland has its own versions of all of these.
I had taken up stamp collecting briefly in the early 60s, and I noticed that British postage stamps don’t name the country–the only country not to name itself on its stamps. I asked my eighth-grade teacher about this and she said it’s because they have a “superiority complex,” whatever that means.
Hey, the British held the Axis off all by themselves for about a year and a half before Pearl Harbor…I guess they have some claim to superiority.
This from someone whose ancestry is Irish. 
Face it. Early movers always get pride of place.
So it is in technology industries…so mote it be in national naming conventions.
One has to doubt your teacher’s competence, objectivity, or her inferiority complex.
The reason is that postage stamps were invented in Britain ( in 1837 Sir Rowland Hill advocated a uniform rate of postage - to be prepaid by stamps - within the British Isles, and the system was implemented in 1840). Because no other country was using them, there was no need to identify the country on the stamp.
Originally posted by Johncole
I would have been hard put to muster a negative comment to her answer, since I myself had asked her the question, and she was a particularly aggressive person, whom I did not dare contradict–not that I, as an eighth-grader 13 years old, would have cared or dared to contradict anyone from my parent’s generation.
I am not sure now, nor was I then, that her answer was pejorative; that’s why I added that comment about World War II: Perhaps the British lived up to a ‘superior attitude.’
The Boat Race is just a contest between the two oldest English universities - why would it have any reference to “Britain” or “England” in its name? As casdave notes with regard to football, when it began there wasn’t anything special about it - it acquired a lot of tradition and recognition over the past centuries, but that’s no reason to change the name.
The Commonwealth is not a British organization - it’s an international organization of countries which formerly made up the Empire. So there’s a very good reason why “British” isn’t in the title.
Harumph! The Brits were not alone - Canada, Australia, Newfoundland, South Africa, and New Zealand were in it from the start.
Another one is the Library Association. This becomes glaringly obvious on the spine of the cataloger’s bible, Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, a collaboration between the “Library Association,” the American Library Association, and the Canadian Library Association.
Linguists would say that the Brits refer to themselves using the “unmarked form” because of their assumption that they are the only ones in the world who count. The superiority complex implied behind this has been well demonstrated in this thread. Reminds me of the guy in the film Gandhi who, while sipping port, says, “Why would India want to get rid of the British? After all, India is British!”
The use of the unmarked form can also be seen in use of the word “religion” when the discussion is limited to varieties of Protestant Christianity. Rastafarians need not apply. Or the use of the word “music” to mean ‘European classical art music’. Once I had a book published in England and the title was “Music”, but instead of being about music in general. it was limited to European classical music. Or in the film A Clockwork Orange: “Alex, they tell me you like music” and they proceed to play a little Ludwig Van.
Since you didn’t specify, I assume of course you’re referring to the empire of Genghis Khan.
American reporters will from time to time refer to it as the British Commonwealth, which I think is a reasonable way to distinguish it from the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or the Commonwealth of Virginia for that matter. Never mind that it’s really the formerly-British Commonwealth. A quick Google search turns up lots of hits, including several Canadian sites. This doesn’t suggest that it’s technically correct, just common usage.
Along the same lines, until fairly recently many species of birds and other animals found in Britain were frequently referred to there simply as “The [whatever]” - without a modifier- if there was only one species of that group found in the country. This was so even if there were many other species of that kind in other parts of the world - the one found in Britain was “The ----.”
Some examples:
The Wren (Winter Wren)
The Swallow (Barn Swallow)
The Frog
The Toad
To be fair, Britain is not the only country that does this. It is a useful brand of iconic phrasing. ‘The World Series’ comes to mind as an example of American arrogance.
Muffins.
Elsewhere they’re called English muffins. In Britain (England and Wales at least) they’re just called muffins.
The sweet thingies from America are making inroads into this terminology (and why not?), but for a while yet, an English muffin will just be a muffin.
I encountered a similar thing when I ordered Singapore Noodles in Singapore: the waiter had never heard of them.
Just to be picky, but at the time, wasn’t Newfoundland a British colony, rather than an independent country like Canada?
I wondered if someone would raise that point.
It was half-way in-between, neither a colony nor a self-governing Dominion.
At the Imperial Conference of 1926, the British Government recognised Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and South Africa as independent dominions, with equal status to the U.K. itself. The Imperial Parliament implemented that constitutional convention in the Statute of Westminster, 1931. So at that time, Newfoundland was of equal status with Canada and the U.K.
Unfortunately for Newfoundland, it was hit very hard by the Great Depression, and essentially went bankrupt. It temporarily surrendered its self-governing status to the British government, which appointed a Commision of Government for Newfoundland. However, that was viewed as a temporary measure, and was not considered the same as colonial status. Then WWII came along, and so it wasn’t until after the war was over that the question of Newfoundland’s future came up. Eventually, they joined Canada in 1949, without regaining full Dominion status in their own right.
But, in relation to my response to dougie monty, I believe that Newfoundland sent their own military contributions to Europe during WWII, separate from the British armed forces, in the same way as Canada and the other Dominions.