Dear British readers, please satisfy my curiosity. When you meet new people, do you say, “I’m British” or “I’m from the UK?” Do you use “UK” or “Great Britain”? Or are they interchangeable? Do you use “England” and “English”?
And also, do you use the word “gormless”? I keep seeing it in British novels but have never heard anybody use it in real life.
I love your country, you all rock.
People from England or Wales usually say they are either English or Welsh. I can’t remember if those from Scotland like to be called Scots or Scottish.
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I’m accustomed to saying, “Nice to meet you — I am gormless!”
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I am not British, but I lived there for about three years. UK refers to the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland. British only refers to Great Britian which includes England, Scotland, and Wales. The terms are not interchangable. UK is roughly analogous to USSR and Great Britian to RSFSR (Rossiia). In contrast English, Scottish, and Welsh are nationalities like Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian. There are also smaller non-territorial national minorities like Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) and people of Afro-Carribean descent. These people often refer to themselves as British, but almost never as English and are generally not accepted by the English as being English.
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With such a set of gormless commenters, especially J Otto Pohl, why bother to provide correct information, when you specifically requested “British readers” to respond!
I am English having been born in England and my parents were English, whereas my children born in Wales are Welsh.
For me the Scottish are Jocks, as US citizens are Yanks! Who, if they were English, would suggest I am being gormless! 😉
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Take no gorm of these pedants.
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An Englishman born in Wales is no more Welsh than a dog born in a manger is a horse to paraphrase a very popular racist joke beloved by the English about people from their former colonies.
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Gormless = out to lunch.
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Really? I had imagined it meant something like lacking in willpower or initiative (which seemed to fit the contexts well enough). Have I been misunderstanding it all this time?
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Yup, gormless is a less perjorative way of saying idiot… “you great gormless lump” is an affectionate way of saying “you idiot” around here
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I don’t know, maybe Google can tell us, but my parents used to say we looked gormless if we had an empty expression on our faces and no idea what to do.
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Yup, I use gormless – it’s a satisfying word to say.
I refer to myself as British, mostly – on forms etc. I am a ‘true English mongrel’, born in England of parents born in England and with known Welsh, Scots and French ancestors (and family oral tradition has it also Irish) within the last few generations. I don’t tend to claim my primary identity as English because I don’t feel a strong attachment to the place I was born (a faceless suburb full of the ‘upwardly mobile’ who liked to pretend their ancestors didn’t exist because they were ashamed of their working class nature, and my parents were both ‘outcomers’ there) and the parts of the country to which I DO feel strong attachments are not constrained by one national border (also, as I think is typical of our generation, I wasn’t born and raised where my extended family was born and raised – my grandparents had both moved away, but both had ‘home places’ where all the rest of the family were, but my parents and my generation are used to travelling to multiple places to see the close bits of our extended families, giving us multiple (or no) geographic loci. Interestingly, my sister stayed where we were born, married a local lad whose family is still pretty much all there, and speaks of herself as not just English but as of that particular county. Same upbringing and context, different outcome.
Also, English identity kind of sets up in opposition to Welsh and Scots identity, and I find the antagonism towards/denegration of English by the others both offensive and sad – being British is partly about NOT being part of a partisan sub-group, but an identity which embraces the mixter-maxter origins of our nation; we’re an edge-country, every group being ‘pushed’ across Europe by other forces ended up here with no-where to go – we’re the descendants of the pre-Celt Britons, of the Celts and Angles and Jutes etc. displaced by Rome and other expansions, of the Danes and Norse from the migration period, of every wave of migration back into pre-history and in our recent past too. I like to own that!
And I guess that also shows that the answer to your question is not simple or tidy!
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I say “English”, but most English people I know say “British”. Scots call themselves Scottish, and Welshmen call themselves Welsh, so in my opinion the word “British” doesn’t mean a whole lot. The term’s normally only used when discussing issues that affect the whole country or by English people who forget that Scotland, Wales, and Nothern Ireland exist.
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I say “English”, but most English people I know say “British”. Scots call themselves Scottish, and Welshmen call themselves Welsh, so in my opinion the word “British” doesn’t mean a whole lot. By right, it should apply to every country in Great Britain, but it’s almost always only used to describe English people. It’s useful when talking about the UK as a whole, though.
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I noticed British was often used to describe people with UK passports who were not from Northern Ireland (the one part of the UK not in GB) who were not one of the territorial nationalities of English, Scottish, or Welsh. That is people of Asian or Afro-Carribean ancestry called themselve British since on the level of citizenship it was obviously true. On the level of natsional’nost it is equally true that they are not considered English no matter how many generations they have lived in London. The works of Kennan Malik and Paul Gilroy are quite good on this especially regarding Afro-Carribean populations in the UK.
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I am English, but I prefer to identify as British.
I lived in Wales for six years and many Welsh people would prefer not to describe themselves as British. However, I did know one guy whose first language was Welsh and identifies as British.
For many people their regional identity is more important. A friend from Newcastle would describe himself as Geordie, rather than English.
In Cornwall, their Cornish identity is very strong and they prefer not to be described as English.
‘UK’ is a term I use when filling in forms. In conversation I’d probably say “I’m British’”or “I’m from Yorkshire”.
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I am not local, but I live in Scotland and my impression is that most people here generally have a strong national identity as Scottish and would never refer to themselves as anything else. As you may know, there will actually be an independence referendum for Scotland from UK on 18 September.
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The short version, with abbreviations:
GB = England + Wales + Scotland
UK = GB + Northern Ireland
British Isles = UK + Republic of Ireland + Isle of Man
Some mobile operators here treat calling the Channel Islands as if you’re making an international call, so let’s follow their lead by leaving them out in order to avoid confusing matters.
I suppose the most sensible way of answering the query about identity and origins is to say, “I’m a Londoner”, which of course answers nothing at all on the subject, making it the ideal answer for those who can’t be bothered … 🙂
Besides, I thought you adopted Montreal at some point, so you could claim to be a Montrealer (and quite possibly also get away with it) …
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“Besides, I thought you adopted Montreal at some point, so you could claim to be a Montrealer (and quite possibly also get away with it) …”
– At some point I did, but out of the 16 years on the continent I cumulatively spent 6 in Montreal and 10 in the US. Now it would be too pretentious even for me to claim that I’m from Montreal.
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I describe myself as English because both my parents also did, as did 2 of my grandparents. I also had a Scottish grandmother. We also consider ourselves British, as we were an army family on my father’s side and it’s called the British Army.
However, England has a North-South divide and however long you live in the North, you can’t be accepted as a Northerner if you weren’t born there. Where the North ends and the South begins – or vice-versa – is moot point!
As for gormless, it’s definitely a word I use! Gormless is a slightly softer way of describing someone as looking dumb and vacant.
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My mother would call me gormless and I occasionally call my kids gormless. I was born in Scotland and have lived there more than 40 years, 20 odd years ago I would have identified myself as British or from the UK (in conversational usage these are interchangeable terms). Anyone using the term Great Britain in conversation might well be flagging up a right wing political stance. Scotland’s forthcoming referendum has polarised how people living in Scotland describe themselves, those intending to vote for independence will be more likely to describe themselves as Scottish.
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