Friday, January 26, 2007

What's up with that?

Why is Holland used interchangeably with the Netherlands in English, but it really isn't the whole of the Netherlands?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What other regions make up the Netherlands?

Don't worry, I don't know either (w/o wikipedia-ing it) and neither does anyone else who lives in the US. There's your answer.

Law Fairy said...

Hmmm.

Maybe for the same reason US citizens use "the US" and "America" interchangeably, even though the US doesn't make up the whole of America.

:D

Anonymous said...

Nah. I asked them the story when I was in Amsterdam last fall. According to the Dutch, Holland is simply the equivalent of a "state" in the United States. It's like calling the United States California because that's the only state anybody cares about. ;-)

Law Fairy said...

drew,

excellent analogy.