Talk:England

There has been to-ing and fro-ing about the word to describe England. It has long been an understanding that we do not call England a "country" (We can still call the southwest "the West Country", and similar usage but not for England as a whole concept). There are plenty of publications which do say "country", but then there are some which say "kingdom" and that is certainly incorrect. There are others which are content with "part" - that indeed has been the standard usage of Acts of Parliament ("that part of the United Kingdom known as England").

This is based on a founding policy, and not wishing to encourage local nationalism, and not wanting to have other parts of the kingdom impliedly shunned. It accords with one of our founding policies Wikishire:Geography in Britain and Ireland#Dividing the United Kingdom.

It seems peculiar to me that only the UK seems to suffer from this. Other countries have been built up from smaller territories over time, some even more recently than the UK (Germany for example) and yet this kind of low-level nationalism continues. Yes, the definition of "country" can be interpreted to mean "any arbitrary bit of land" but then it loses all meaning; which is why it is odd to see its attempted use with such vigour to describe the various parts of the UK. Owain (talk) 08:39, 10 June 2014 (UTC)