Neither far nor east of where I sit

Thanks to Liam Fitzpatrick over at Time's China Blog for raising one of my pet peeves - the continued practice of many Europeans, particularly my own countrymen in the UK, to refer to Asia as the Far East. From where two-fifths of the world's population sits, it is neither east nor far from anywhere.

This bad, Eurocentric habit derives from a century ago when the colonialists sat in London and Paris trying to divide the world up between them. It's time they gave it up as they had to their colonies.