(May 15, 2015 at 5:41 am)robvalue Wrote: You know, I never actually made the connection between UK and "kingdom". Wow! I just thought about it as its name.
That is natural with names, to not think about what they mean. I have a cousin who grew up in the southern part of the U.S., who thought "damn Yankee" was one word when he was a little kid. (If he had seen it in print, it would have been immediately obvious that it is two words, but he only heard it in speech.)
My mother told me a story of when she was a little girl, referring to Brazil nuts by racist slang, because that was the name of them that she had heard other people use (judging from what her parents were like, I am pretty sure my mother must not have picked it up from them, but from other children or other adults). However, a black friend of hers pointed out the meaning, and my mother never called them by the racist slang ever again.
(I am purposefully leaving off what the racist slang was, as I do not wish to reintroduce such terminology into the world, as I have never heard anyone use it myself, and some things are best left dead.)
Back to the issue at hand, obviously, you could keep calling yourselves the United Kingdom, even if you were no longer a kingdom. A name need not accurately represent the thing named. (In some cases, that is the point of the name, though that is not applicable in this instance.)
But I think the question is academic, as I doubt you are going to abolish the monarchy any time soon. (Even though you should have abolished it long ago. But that does not make you worse than other people; there are many things we ought to be doing differently, too.)
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
