Interesting, thanks! I would have thought that'd be shortened to "COBE".

That "O" would exist in pretty much all British honours, so it's just redundant.

The levels of the order (which is the only one used on a regular basis, post-WW2) are MBE/OBE/CBE/KBE/GBE.

It's not just that. "of" and "the" are often omitted from initialisms, possibly as a lingering effect of, and false transferral of the conventions from, Latin where "of" is just the genitive case and "the" does not exist.

"Rolling on the floor laughing" should properly be "ROTFL" but usually is "ROFL", and that example is nothing to do with Britain or the honours system. "Member of Parliament" is "MP" not "MOP". "Batchelor of Science" is not "BOSc." but is "BSc.". And so on.

I suspect that "Lord of the Rings" is only "LOTR" because the sort of people who use "ROTFL" are the sort of people who even read the appendices to Tolkein and got there first. (-:

The O we were talking about is for "Order" :D

(Btw in the '90s, when it mattered, ROTFL was ROTFL and that was that... Now get off my lawn.)

One should rather ask why the UK still hands out orders that have 'British Empire' in their title :)

Wait until you hear about the House of Lords and hereditary titles.

Unfortunately I know it already. The more you know about the UK legal and political system the less it looks democratic

To be fair they are slowly making their institutions conform to a more democratic outlook.

For example, their Supreme Court finally moved out of the House of Lords in 2009... (so much for "separation of powers" before that, even though they were joined only in name...)

But contrast the situation of the United State of America, whose "Supreme Court" rather than an independent institution is in fact filled with partisan hacks to such an extent that it appears many on the Right felt that it was worth the obvious downsides of Donald Trump as President to get more Supreme Court justices.

Even the Law Lords (as they were typically called when the exact same body existed as notionally part of the House of Lords prior to becoming the UK's Supreme Court) were way more independent than that. A Government minister can say "No" to the pick of the committee which independently chooses candidates for this job, but they can't pick for themselves, the committee can just give them the same name again until (inevitably) the minister gets replaced with one who doesn't say "No".

It would in theory be easier for a British government to abolish their Supreme Court than for the US government, but in reality in both cases it would cause a constitutional crisis. The UK is quite capable of having a constitutional crisis, you don't need to write your constitution down to do that, but it isn't very likely.