Mainland England/WWI
davewitley
dfrankiswork at netscape.net
Mon Jan 24 13:51:40 UTC 2005
Catlady wrote:
> << So next time I was stuck in an airport with my plane delayed
> (fairly normal as I'm not from mainland England, but I'm at
university
> on the mainland) >>
>
> *sympathetic shudder* at delayed planes being normal. Btw, as a
> USAmerican, I'm not accustomed to the phrase 'mainland England'.
Yeah, I was interested in that one. My take is: not Scotland, Wales
or Northern Ireland because one would just say 'England'; not the
Channel Islands or Isle of Man for the same reason since although
they are not normally regarded as countries they are not part of
England; not Isle of Wight (probably) or a lesser inshore island,
because one wouldn't usually fly (though perhaps to the north of
England?); that leaves the Isles of Scilly, I think. Fog, I bet,
delays the planes.
>I'm not aware of WWI being mass
> insanity -- didn't I already post about this during LOTR-FOTR movie
> discussions? -- a *few* Serbian nationalists plotted to
assassinate an
> archduke and one of them more-or-less accidentally succeeded, so
the
> Austrian-Hungarian Empire found it necessary to militarily chastise
> Serbia (I think it's called something like "suppressing an
> insurgency"). Apparently the Russian Empire found it necessary to
send
> an army to defend the Serbs because they were fellow Orthodox
> Christians. Then countries found it necessary to join in on one
side
> or the other because they had treaties to ally with Austria-
Hungary or
> Russia or one of the other countries that joined in.
I agree that to put all the blame on Germany is a little one-sided,
but somehow your rebuttal of the charge of mass insanity is not
working for me here.
David
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