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Daily Archives: June 29th, 2012

Recently, I’ve been noticing a lot of grammatical errors in publications.  Places where you would think there wouldn’t be grammatical errors.  Or at least, big ones.

The most recent one invovles some KitchenAid documentation.  I think a warranty notice or something.

If you reside in the 50 United States…

If you reside in the 50 United States?  Wait.  There’s more than one country called the United States?  And apparently you have to be a resident of all 50 of them?  So, it’s like a case of dual citizenship, but times 25?  Well, it doesn’t say you have to be a citizen of the country.  Just a resident.  I guess that’s not too bad.

But what would you call being a citizen of 50 different countries anyway?  Being a citizen of two different countries is called “dual citizenship.”  Well, the citizenship part can stay the same, but how about something called 50?  Well, the prefix meaning “five” is “penta-” and “ten” is “deca-.”  I don’t think there’s anything specifically for 50.  So I guess it’s pentadecasomething citizenship.  What would be the proper ending though? I guess I could just use the standard “-ple.”  So, it would be pentadecaple citizenship.

That’s…pretty hard.  Especially since at least one of the United States has that rule about giving up citizenship to other countries when you become a citizen of the United States.  Well, I guess you don’t really have to give up the citizenship of the other countries.  The US just won’t recognize it.  I wonder how that works with extradition treaties.

Btw, isn’t it really confusing to have several countries with all the same name?  I mean, how do you address things?  What about country codes?  The US I live in has the country code of 1.  What about the others?  And how would you designate that on paper?  The country code of United States XII?  You want to send this package to the United States L?  This is so confusing.

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