‘Why didn’t they call it Very British Railways?’ asked my husband. Unwittingly (as in most of his remarks), he had put his finger on something odd about the new name for the nationalised rail structure, Great British Railways.
It follows the model of Great British Bake Off. In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary noticed the tendency in a quotation from a magazine published in 2006: ‘The Great British queuer is a bit of a myth.’ In that construction a reference to Great Britain is ‘used punningly, as though great rather than Great British were the modifier’.
In the 19th century, the same joke was deployed in the phrase Great British Public. It had the ironic implication that the public was not so great. Similarly, the Great British Summer suggests rain. All this being the case, Great British Railways seems a strange choice for an enterprise hoping to prosper.
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