Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxs | Hacker News Reader

One can tell the British background by the mix of metric ('kilo') and imperial ('mile').

Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.

View on HN

I mean, "4 hour drive to get to England" also puts quite a limit on the search space.

A lot of France and Belgium is about one 4 hour drive away from England ;)

You don't drive in the Eurotunnel

Not really, but it's not very different. You just drive to the train, park on the train and drive off the train when it stops. I haven't been to England for a long time but when I did I was simply calling it driving to England.

I'd still call somewhere on the continent an 'N hour drive.' The 'drive' part indicates traveling by car the entire distance (I've never been on a eurotunnel trip where we bothered getting a cabin so we were sat in the car the entire time) and in any case it's pretty clear what you meant given the absence of pure land routes.

Threads like this always make me realize that Canada's sprawl is real.

4 hour drive and you're about half way to your parent's place, and they're in the same province.

100 miles is a long way in Europe, 100 years is a long time in America.

The impression was before reaching that point

I'm not particularly "defensive" about units.

I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.

Being Scottish technically makes you British, at least until independence comes. I'd argue that, even then, it will remain the case - as long as we accept that Scotland will continue to be part of the British Isles, and in particular of the island of Britain.

Scotland and Britain are separate countries in the UK with separate histories. No-one means the island when they talk about being British, they mean the descendants of the Britons.

> The term "Great Britain" can also refer to the political territory of England, Scotland and Wales, which includes their offshore islands.[12] This territory and Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom.[13] The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England (which at the time incorporated Wales) and Scotland.

Would be a nice thought, but literally nobody means the descendants of the Britons where talking about being British.

If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion.

Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.

You're incorrect, so have the obligatory CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

Thanks for the reference. Unfortunately I can’t edit the comment anymore.

The irony of a comment trying to riff on the usual "Britain isn't England" trope while getting it completely and utterly wrong, is... remarkable. You are GPT and I claim my devalued £1.

I recognise Gordonjcp's autonomy to choose their own preferred identity. Nationality is a social construct that can be perceived differently in various contexts. If someone prefers to identify as Scottish rather than British, at least in informal settings, I believe it's important to respect their perspective instead of insisting on a particular label.

Of course, they might _technically_ be British from a legal standpoint, which I'm sure Gordonjcp is aware of. It's entirely possible to be both British and not-British simultaneously in different contexts. This sort of thing isn't black and white.

> I believe it's important to respect their perspective instead of insisting on a particular label.

Absolutely, but it would be nice if people expressed their wishes in logical terms. "I prefer to describe that dog as a terrier" is logically sound, "that is a terrier, not a dog" is not. The latter tries to arbitrarily redefine what a dog is.

"I am not British, I'm Scottish." is just shorthand for that.

It's a bit like "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"

Charlie's not just a dog, but he's indeed a dog.

Shorthands are fine, but this is not it. This is some weird agenda to deny the logical truth.

> "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"

I'd argue that one can be damaging and we should call people out on it.

Dogs are dogs and they need to be treated like dogs. The infantilization of dogs is how you get unleashed dogs getting into dog fights when it turns out that Charlie really just is another dog and should have been leashed.

I mean, it says "United Kingdom of Great Britain" on the front of my recently-issued taking-back-control-of-Britain blue passport, printed in Poland by a French company using Spanish presses and software, Italian ink, Finnish paper, and equipped with an RFID tag made in Turkey, all of whom beat out a company in Sunderland for the contract, who have since gone bust.

Yay for Brexit.

I think I'd liken it to the fact that -I- consider myself to be European as well as British, but there are plenty of people who clearly don't, even if arguably European is technically correct as a descriptor of all of us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com