User talk:Ondewelle
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[edit] Winston Churchill
Hi, and welcome to wiki. I noticed that you changed the line 'prime minister of great britain', to 'prime minister of the united kingdom'. Admittedly the two descriptions are each half of the full name, but I suspect churchill would have been more likey to think of himself as PM of Great Britain, rather than the more egalitarian sounding UK? He was running a country which still had a world spanning empire Sandpiper (talk) 09:46, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks for your welcome! The trouble is that Great Britain is not a country. It is an island, really, the island on which England, Scotland and Wales are situated. Churchill could have been described as the "British prime minister" because the adjective "British" has come to be accepted as the de facto adjective relating to the UK (as well as to Great Britain, of course). The UK might have had an empire in Churchill's day, but he was not prime minister of the empire, he was just prime minister of the UK. Ondewelle (talk) 11:47, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
- Hmm, but even to me, UK is a modern invention. The article is discussing a historical position which is not the same one as now. What occurred to me was how would it have been described at the time. Sandpiper (talk) 20:30, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
- At the time it was the United Kingdom. (The full title was then, and still is, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Referring to the country as Great Britain leaves out Northern Ireland — and some people in Northern Ireland would find that deeply, but deeply, offensive. It's also not accurate. Before Irish independence in 1922, the country was still the United Kingdom: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.)
