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Comment by thebruce87m | Hacker News Reader

> The acquisition is expected to secure up to 100 skilled jobs in the North East and safeguard a critical part of the UK’s defence infrastructure.

The “North East” in the context of the UK and “the North East of England” are not interchangeable.

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The "North East" is the proper name of a NUTS 1 [0] region of the UK. It is distinguished from your interpretation of it as the "north east of the UK" by its use of capital letters, as is standard in English [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Territorial_Leve...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun#Modern_English_cap...

Unless I am missing it, all references to “North East” in your first link are accompanied by “England” directly after.

It seems to be used both with and without. In the main table with the maps it's not directly after, there's a comma. The ", England" is specifying the country, same as where it says "Yorkshire and the Humber, England", "East Midlands, England", etc. There's no comma part for "East of England", because there it is part of the name. In the demographics table it is directly followed by "England".

A more official source puts "England" in brackets, as if it's not part of the name but just to disambiguate: https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/ukgeographies/e...

I'd love to know more about what you mean by that -- is it that the North East of England (which this factory is certainly in, it being in County Durham) is not the same as the North East of the UK (which I guess would be Aberdeen)? Or is there more to it than that?

That’s pretty much it. If you visit somewhere like r/CasualUK you will get people talking about “up north” and “being a proud northerner” and such like. They are all English people talking about England. Which is fine, but it’s supposed to be a UK subreddit.

Even when foreigners are asking about travel advice. Must confuse the hell out of them. Or maybe some foreigners think that England = UK anyway so it all balances out?

England == UK isn’t a thing here in Canada, but I imagine it isn’t in any commonwealth nation. I think we learned more about the UK as kids than we did about the United States.

Same in Australia. But my Dad was a Scotsman so I had it well emphasised

In the same way that England isn't the UK, reddit isn't HN.

If you want to complain about a subreddit, go there.

It makes no sense but it’s common parlance. It’s like “Northern Rivers” in Australia meaning “an area on the east coast south of Queensland”. Similarly “The North East” rarely means an area containing Aberdeen, which would make more sense.

My experience is that only people in England think it is common parlance. If you are taking to someone in Scotland about the uk and mention the “north east” with no further context, they are not thinking about England.

North East of London, obviously.

Don't get me started on Midwest in the US...

Coming from the Best Coast I’d call it the Mideast if that wasn’t already taken. I begrudgingly accept calling it the Midwest for only that reason.

It's a UK website. In common parlance in the UK, they are interchangeable.

I live in the UK. In my experience only English people think they are interchangeable since they use it a lot implicitly.

I also live in the UK. I mean, sure I agree with you, but that doesn't stop it being common parlance.

It’s definitely not common parlance in Scotland to say “north east” when talking about the UK and mean England, but I can’t speak for NI or Wales.

A UK website making international articles should at least use “North East of England”, or perhaps “North East (England)” to comply with the official ONS ITL name as someone else pointed out. Even UK wide articles should do this.

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