swill453 wrote:Gengulphus wrote:An American you don't know especially well says "She lived in England" to you about someone he's telling you about. Maybe he knows the difference and is using "England" correctly, maybe he doesn't but she is actually from England, maybe he doesn't and she is actually from Scotland or Wales. As a result, it's not sensible to treat what he's said as wrong, because it probably isn't. But it is sensible to treat what he has said as ambiguous, i.e. it's not clear what he means. In most circumstances, it's best to just let the ambiguity pass - but in some (e.g. she's died and he's asking you about dealing with her estate) it needs to be clarified.
Naughty, naughty, that's moving the goalposts! Of course
that's ambiguous, but my response was to your post which said
"England" is frequently used to mean the whole of Great Britain.
That is unambiguously wrong.
Naughty, naughty, that's trying to present your words as saying something other than what they did. Specifically:
swill453 wrote:Gengulphus wrote:Not officially, no - but in informal usage (in the US especially), "England" is frequently used to mean the whole of Great Britain. So in some contexts, there's an ambiguity that needs to be looked out for.
Being from the non-English part of Great Britain, I would call that
wrong and not ambiguous, and will always correct it where I can.
Such uses of "that" generally refer to the last thing they reasonably can - in this case, it's "
in some contexts, there's an ambiguity that needs to be looked out for", not the earlier "
"England" is frequently used to mean the whole of Great Britain". I can easily accept given what you've now said that you
meant that the earlier phrase was wrong, but it's not what you
said.
But actually, I think that "
"England" is frequently used to mean the whole of Great Britain" is almost certainly not wrong, but a correct statement of fact when viewed on a worldwide basis, and may well be even on a UK basis. "Great Britain" is not a particularly well-known term, especially outside the UK (*), and the alternative "England, Scotland and Wales" is a bit of a mouthful.
(*) Most of my primary education was in the US, and at its end I certainly knew many country names, including "England" - but not "Great Britain" beyond possibly having sometimes heard my parents use it.
Gengulphus