I’ve always thought that this phrase is completely backwards. In fact, the sun always sets in a truly global empire. Every single minute. Or, similarly, always rises. It’s just stupid to say it never sets.
Why doesn’t this bother anybody else?
The Sun sets on pieces of the British Empire, but never on the whole thing.
I’ve had this conversation IRL and the same arguments come up. That probably means this is not going to lead anaywhere here either. I don’t know why my thinking is so different from all mankind, but I still think it’s a stupid saying. I just get the mental image of a bunch of Canadians celebrating in the middle of the night the bright day in Australia.
I do understand this is supposed to be really poetic and elegant. To me the elegance of the up-lifting spirit is lost in the obvious selective bias of it. Everybody notices immediately that you can also say that the night never ends in the British Empire. There are plenty of ways to express global proportions. One should pick a saying that does not point directly to how selective the expression is. If you said that wheat always grows in the British Empire, it would make a lot more sense to me.
It’s supposed to have a sort of double meaning- “Our Empire is so large [How large is it?] that it’s always daylight in some part of it!” and “Our Empire is so awesome and advanced and the greatest and best Empire in the world, it’s going to be around forever and still be awesome.”