I have found out that CONCACAF, which is the governing federation for football nations in North America, the Caribbean, and those little countries in South America that would have no chance of beating Brazil and Argentina (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) prefers to be called “The Football Confederation”
Take that UEFA!
I believe that the British Open golf tournament is just called “The Open Championship”.
The point I brought up about “The Boat Race” wasn’t as much about the country as that it doesn’t identify anybody in it.
Then again over on this side of the Pond, the Harvard-Yale football game is just called “The Game”.
Mrs Mangetout: My car won’t start; I’ll have to call the AA
Mangetout: You mean the British AA?
Mrs Mangetout: Errr, yes, anyway, I’ll have one of those muffins while I wait.
Mangetout: You mean some American muffins that we haven’t got? or these English muffins on the table? OK, here you go.
Mrs Mangetout: Thanks. Oh, look! there’s a robin on the bird table!
**Mangetout: **Do you mean a European Robin or an American Robin?
Silly, isn’t it.
Britain is an island, a fairly small one by comparison to many other populated land masses; there’s simply no need for us to refer to The Automobile Association as anything other than just that.
As mentioned earlier, the postage stamp/service was invented in the UK, so stamps did not have the country’s name on them. Very similar to the Internet, started in the US so US domains are whatever.com rather than whatever.co.us (or something). I know that .com domains have spread out into the rest of the world, but the principle is true.
As an Australian, I find it amusing that Americans are picking on Britain for this. To me, it always seems that America considers itself the only place on earth - one example: dot com. Everywhere else is .co.uk or .com.au or .com.(insert other country codes here), but the US is .com. Yes, I know this is because the internet started in the US, but at some point it began to go global, and yet America never adopted .com.us as their standard. This isn’t the best example, but it’s certainly the first example to come to mind.
I guess my perception is coloured by being on the internet - with so many Americans and so few of the rest of us, it really isn’t unreasonable for Americans to presume that I am one of them, but it’s still annoying at times.
As an Australian postal worker, I can tell you that many, many Americans don’t bother writing “USA” on postcards they send home. We are expected to know where to sort Dogsbum, TX.
I won’t let the Brits get off that easily though. It’s amazing the lengths to which they will go to avoid using numbers in their addresses (numbers are for those frightful commoners). You’ll get mail going to ridiculous addresses like:
Bob Smith, esq
c/o The Custodian
The Mews
Holmesbury House
(Servants’ Quarters)
Wolseley Lane (south)
Off Great Smythebridge Way
Strathbowenluffinghamtonshurstburghville
Near East Bollockton,
West Dopershire
England
United Kingdom
Along these same lines, there was a 19th century publication called Dictionary of National Biography, which was purely about British subjects. OUP is publishing an updated version whose title still fails to mention that it’s just about Ukogbanisters[sup]1[/sup]: New Dictionary of National Biography.
I’m sorry, that isn’t a good enough reason. Not at all. So they were first, big deal, that was a while ago and now many other countries do it. While it may be the initial reason, there is clearly (in my mind) more to it than that nowadays.
Why is that a problem for you? Don’t you just put it in the box for “UK” and let the Royal Mail sort it out at our end? If you went to the destination you’d probably find there were only about ten houses in the village and the local postie knew them all by name (how else would it work). Let’s say I was posting a letter to an outback destination in Australia and it began “Bill’s Place” I’d just assume it was going to a small town, not that they couldn’t count or something.
Why is it a problem for you that the sender’s stamp doesn’t identify its country of origin? Do you expect the French to use English on their stamps because that’s a language you’d recognise? Surely countries are entitled to design their stamps/coins/banknotes anyway they want and British stamps are designed without words on because there’s no reason to do it any differently. I’m sure that if the US Mail dropped the words from its stamps nobody except stamp collectors would notice or care.
Why? Once the UK has started issuing postage stamps with no country designation (at least, no explicit country designation; the Queen’s head appears on all UK postage stamps) why would they ever see a need to add in a country designation later? What problems does leaving out a country designation cause to the UK? To any other country?
The parallel with domain names is relevant. The US nomenclature authorities, whatever they are called, do not use a country desigation because, basically, when they started they were the only people in the business. Other countries now have nomenclature authorities, and they do use country designations, but the US authorities have never found any need to start using them. Does this cause a problem? No. Is there any reason for changing? No. Why interrupt a consistent and easily-followed practice? Why change internet naming conventions when the whole idea of conventions is that they should be stable?
Same with postage stamps. The only reason why the UK post office might want to put a country designation on their stamps is so that they can tell at a glance whether the stamp on a letter posted in the UK is indeed a UK stamp, and not one bought somewhere else. But they can do this from the Queen’s head, and from the fact that a stamp bought in any other country -i]will* have a country designation. So they don’t have a problem. So they don’t need to make a change.
Also, although the Royal Mail won’t actually refuse to handle mail without a postcode, every address in the UK has a postcode, and they do prefer you to use it.
(For the benefit of non-UK’ers [hmm… I quite like “Ukogbanisters”], postcodes in this country consist of a post-out code which identifies a general area, and a post-in code that identifies a specific point on a postal route within that area. For example, I’m in OX2 [section 2 of city of Oxford and environs] and my post-in is 6DW [meaningful only to the Post Office itself, but it pins me down to a specific apartment building] - but you’d also need my flat’s number before you could mail me anthrax, the postcode isn’t quite that precise. Postcodes are usually of the format XX1 2YY, but there are exceptions, particularly in the big cities.)