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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Or the term "pub." In the US it's much more usual to say "bar." Maybe "tavern" but that sounds rather dated to my ear.

When I lived in the PNW people used the word pub more than bar.

That’s because everybody up there thinks that liking soccer makes them English.

My sense is that it is an affectation meant to indicate an aspiration to something more than a bar (and its coarse patrons).

"Bar" is certainly the catch-all term in the U.S., but "pub" is also very widely understood to refer to a specific type of bar, especially (but not limited to) bars deliberately styled as Irish or British pubs.

Along a similar note, I hate when a Bar is labelled as a "Pub" and doesn't serve food. IMO, in the US, if it's labelled a "pub" it should serve food.

Come to Virginia, where it's outright illegal for any establishment serving alcohol to not also serve food (and not only must food be served, it must account for at least 45% of revenue).

I'm nut sure I'd go that far... it's just I expect a "Pub" to include pub food.

Do they make you order food with every round of drinks? I remember hearing about places like that from my dad, and it seems it would have worked better in the era of cheap drinks/low built-in alcohol taxes.

I went to college in a county that only allowed alcohol sales with food for clubs (think: country clubs). So, of course, the restaurant that I worked for created its own club. You simply filled out your name (and maybe phone number, I don't remember) on a piece of paper when you ordered your drink.

They easy way would be to do like in some parts of Spain, for every drink you receive a tapa.

That way it can be considered that the food is part of the price of the drink.

There just aren't bars as proper bars. There are only bars in restaurants, where they can count on actual diners to buy plenty of food.

every now and then you'll find a public house or similarly named

"Pub" is a fairly common term throughout the world. But "pub that needs you" made it pretty obvious that it was about pubs in England.

Did it? I put my postcode in and got nothing. It took browsing the map to discover it had no results for Scotland at all.

Yes. Being on the other side of the world, I've only ever heard of efforts to save English pubs. Thus, without more details, one knows that is what is being referred to. Perhaps Scotland has the same kind of movement happening at the local level, but something on a global website implies global context.

The website is for England and Wales.

Wales comes along with England due to how their legal framework is setup. It is a good technical point you raise, but for all intents and purposes within the context they are the same place.

And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)

> And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population

98% of the UK population can speak English, so I'm not sure where you got that idea. Clearly every part (maybe some small, uncelebrated village breaks the rule) of the UK has a language spoken by virtually the entire population of that region.

> (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)

If you are struggling to say that England is the only country in the UK that sees most of its population still speak the language of its ancestral roots, then I suppose that's true, but when English is the most commonly used natural language across the entire world I'm not sure that is much of a feat.

What does any of this have to do with the discussion at hand?

Are you joking? They meant Wales, 27.7% of the population of Wales speak Welsh (and yes most of them English too).

Wales/Welsh doesn’t jive under the conditions set. Perhaps you missed "non-trivial percentage"? Outer Hebrides is a part of the UK where ~50% of its residents speak Scottish, never mind England and its English dominance, so clearly ~30% is still considered within trivial range. Otherwise "the one part" doesn't work; seeing many parts of the UK fit the bill.

Being on the other side of the world, I had never heard of efforts to save English pubs, so that doesn’t sound like a global context at all.

Maybe not so much active efforts to save them, but the mass lamentation around the collapse of the industry that has been going on for several decades. What efforts there are to save them is merely an extension of that.

Much the same thing has happened here too (the local watering holes struggling and failing, that is), but that isn't even considered newsworthy at the local level, let alone a message that has spread far and wide. English pubs, for whatever reason, are the only ones that have consistently caught grander attention.

But there will always be someone living under a rock, as they say.

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