Short Stuff: Great Britain

**Josh** (0:04)
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, sitting in for a date. And we're all dames and lads and knights, and all that stuff here at Stuff You Should Know.

**Chuck** (0:18)
Yeah, I feel like this one is long overdue because we have gotten a lot of email over the years about us screwing up the difference between Britain and England and the United Kingdom.

**Josh** (0:28)
Never again.

**Chuck** (0:29)
Well, hopefully never again, and hopefully we get all this right. I do want to say in our defense, though, or at least my defense, a lot of times I have said England for somebody who was from England, and people have called me out and said, you can't just say England if it's Britain or the UK or something. And I'm like, but they were born in London. I can't say they're English.

**Josh** (0:52)
What you didn't know is the person who called you out is from California.

**Chuck** (0:56)
Yeah, probably so.

**Josh** (0:58)
So yeah, we're going to try to get this right, and we will try to continue in the future. But hey, we're only human, but flesh and blood, some men. So we might get it wrong eventually at some point.

**Chuck** (1:10)
That's right. So I guess we should start out by saying that the UK, the United Kingdom isn't the same thing as saying Great Britain.
The UK has a longer name. It's the United King officially. It's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

**Josh** (1:24)
That's a mouthful.

**Chuck** (1:25)
It is. So they just say UK, but it is a nation state of four countries, which is England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

**Josh** (1:34)
That's right.

**Chuck** (1:35)
So what's Great Britain?

**Josh** (1:36)
Okay. That was the UK. I think we should go over it three more times.

**Chuck** (1:40)
That's the stuff you should know way.

**Josh** (1:42)
Great Britain is an actual geographical area, the physical landmass that England, Scotland, and Wales share.

**Chuck** (1:50)
The island.

**Josh** (1:51)
It is. It's the island of, well, Great Britain.

**Chuck** (1:55)
Yeah, like Greece.

**Josh** (1:56)
It's the UK, except Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain because it's on a different island, right?

**Chuck** (2:03)
That's right.

**Josh** (2:03)
It's still part of the UK. It's just not part of Great Britain. I don't think they care either.

**Chuck** (2:08)
Yeah. Northern Ireland, as you would guess, is on the northern tip of Ireland.

**Josh** (2:14)
Just the tip.

**Chuck** (2:15)
Also an island next door to Great Britain. I'm so afraid we're going to screw this up still.

**Josh** (2:20)
We're not. We're not. We can read everything verbatim. How about that?

**Chuck** (2:23)
I've not been this nervous in a long time recording an episode.

**Josh** (2:26)
Okay. We've got Great Britain. It's an island.
It's an island off the coast of mainland Europe.

**Chuck** (2:33)
A big one.

**Josh** (2:34)
England, Scotland, and Wales all share it.
To the west of Great Britain, as we said, is Ireland a different island? There's Northern Ireland and Ireland. Are we really doing this? Sure. The reason that there's Northern Ireland and Ireland is that Ireland broke away from the British Crown in 1922 Northern Ireland said, no, we're going to stay, which is why Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom as well. Just not part of Great Britain, everybody.

**Chuck** (3:03)
That's right. We have another term that we need to mention, which is the British Isles, also a geographical term.
It can be a little dodgy as far as, I'm not sure how controversial it is.

**Josh** (3:17)
Pretty controversial.

**Chuck** (3:18)
Yeah.
There are thousands of these islands off the coast of Northwest Europe. A ton of them, like the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man. I guess, boy, I'm very bravely going out on a limb and saying the Isle of White.

**Josh** (3:37)
That's pretty brave. I would not do that.

**Chuck** (3:39)
I didn't look that up, but I think so. But like I said, several thousand of these islands, and some of these islands, like the Isle of Man, for one, are not part of the United Kingdom.
They are politically tied to a degree, but technically they are a distinct thing.

**Josh** (3:55)
We think.

**Chuck** (3:56)
That's right.

**Josh** (3:57)
Let's take a break.

**Chuck** (3:58)
All right.

**Josh** (4:00)
Let's take a breath.

**Chuck** (4:33)
All right, so there's, I hope it's been clear so far. We've said everything three times. The issue of governance is also at hand because at various times over the years, and we're not gonna dig too deeply into this because we're trying to have fun here, but like there have been the idea that like Scotland may want to break away or Wales may want to break away. I think the last time Scotland tried was 2014