alt Hacker NewsIn all fairness, I deal with British tourists a lot and they always talk about "going to Europe" when they refer to their summer holiday in Benidorm.
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I don't think that's a problem, and it doesn't mean that Britain is not in Europe, IMO. Comes naturally with human perspective. "Where did you go this summer?" A) "I stayed in England"; B) "I travelled around Britain"; C) "I went to Europe". All perfectly understandable, I think..
yea but that's clear from the context
we use "going to Europe" and "going to the continent" fully aware that the UK is in Europe
I live in continental Europe, and we also say "going to Europe" when talking about holiday trips abroad. It's just a natural thing to say when you want to stress you're going outside of the border, buy without being overly specific.
We are nothing, if not needlessly complex!
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the locals refer to SF proper as “The City” (not “Frisco”.)
So, they may live in Cupertino, Palo Alto, or Oakland, but when they say “we’re going to The City for a concert on Saturday!” we can hear them pronounce those capital letters as an unambiguous reference to the one, true City.
But almost invariably in this context they mean "the continent" ie France, Spain, Italy and so on, probably not Scandi and not Ireland. So that's more like how people would say they're going "to the UK" when actually they're travelling to like the Isle of Man or even sometimes Jersey which are not in the UK but like sure, people who speak English live there, if some lunatics attacked them the military forces would work for the UK, and in Man's case it even makes geographical sense (Jersey is basically in France, it isn't French for historical reasons) but these places are not part of the United Kingdom any more than Canada or Australia. Same King, different government.